ABSTRACT
Almost universally, care and protection orders are adopted in legislation in order to enable children to be removed from their families and be placed in what is generally called ‘alternative care’. Many service users who were removed from their parents are generally unequivocal in their condemnation of what they call ‘the no care system’. The suggestion they make is that care is simply an outcome of legal proceedings. Child protection practitioners work in risk-saturated environments where relationships are fractured, care is fragile and sometimes frightening, and value-based practice with a broader focus than the child unit is particularly difficult. There is a high intensity of emotional labour demanded of those ‘doing care’ in such environments. A consequence is that the rationality represented in particular by the requirements of legal decision-making and deontological ethics has been privileged. The question addressed in this chapter is how, if at all, a feminist ethic of care with its attendant and complex view of morality and the centrality within it of relationship, can provide better understanding of how the caring professions can work more ‘care-fully’ in the contested area of the practice called child protection.
