ABSTRACT
Technologies and modes of governance have developed in various ways over time, and in this chapter we consider the way that the practice of states seeking to govern how families behave and parents bring up their children has long roots. We interrogate the historical and current elements of identifying both the cause of and resolution to social problems including crime as familial and intergenerationally transmitted within specific low-income families and the governing of such families through technologies of stigma. We illustrate the negative labelling of socially and economically marginal families and the implications of governance interventions in their lives historically and contemporarily through four critical case examples: the Victorian Charity Organisation Society (UK and USA), the emergence of the UK probation service, the English Troubled Families Programme, and United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) initiatives.
