ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we consider family policy in the context of family caring activities. Families are expected to provide care, and so it is important to recognize when they fail to do so. Such failures are not readily reconciled with the mythologies of the family which family policies tend to invoke. This is evident in the three issues discussed in this chapter, community care, child abuse and domestic violence, although in rather different ways. Policies to promote community care implicitly or explicitly rely on the caring role of families, particularly women. Child abuse challenges conceptions of the family as a caring institution and in particular our regard for its privacy. Responses to domestic violence tend to incorporate violence within a framework of (caring) family relationships assumed to render it less unacceptable — a matter for negotiation and management rather than prosecution. The effectiveness of policies which fail to distinguish rhetoric and reality is doubtful. It is especially difficult to strike an appropriate balance between the respective roles and responsibilities of family and state.
