ABSTRACT
This chapter has been selected for its careful examination of the impact of scandals and inquiries on legislation, organisational arrangements, policy and practice; the context is the UK, but the story is a familiar one elsewhere. Jones asserts that scandals and inquiries are not solely responsible for the transformation that has taken place in local authority social services since 1970. On the contrary, institutional change often began before the scandals and inquiries that followed the death of a child or the killing of a person by someone with a mental disorder. But what these scandals and inquiries, and the accompanying media coverage, have done, Jones argues, is to precipitate a focus on risk and attempts to manage risk. This, he concludes, has been to the detriment of social work’s central purpose of helping people in crisis and difficulty.
