Realising the ‘child and risk’, crafting neoliberal child protection: the 1989 Children Act

By Michael Lambert

In the sphere of welfare, the 1980s and 1990s sought to ‘roll back’ the frontiers and responsibility of the state to care. Especially for its children. There was, after all, according to the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, no such thing as society. Deniz Arzuk has readily shown how such a perception cast a long shadow across the 1980s and 1990s. Children were individuals. Just like everyone else. The ‘rolling forward’ of the welfare state of the 1950s and 1960s soon became a distant memory. Writing in 1986, historian Carolyn Steedman famously reflected that: ‘I think I would be a very different person now if orange juice and milk and dinners at school hadn’t told me, in a covert way, that I had a right to exist, was worth something’. Although Thatcher snatched children’s milk before the 1980s, it was a taste of the future to come. For her, some children were not worth much.

Encapsulating this individualising ethos in conceptualising children’s welfare is 1989 Children Act, passed the same year as the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC). These enshrined, for the first time, the idea of children’s rights in welfare practice. The United Kingdom became a signatory the following year, with the convention ratified and came into force in 1992. This not only articulated that children actually were worth something, but that their voice and views mattered in decisions taken notionally on their behalf. Accordingly, by the end of Thatcher’s Britain children were individuals just like everyone else. She might have snatched their milk, but this was to reduce their dependency on the state and enable their best interests to be realised.

Between the political rhetoric of collectivist welfarism and individual rights for the child sits the role of the state. Claims to be acting in the best interests of the child through the 1989 Act and listening to the voice of the child were, in reality, disingenuous. The Act represents a residualisation of the responsibility of the state which focused on identifying and intervening in cases of where children were either a risk, or at risk. Similarly, the notion of children’s rights was nothing new. The 1989 UN CRC was signed to celebrate 30 years since the original UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959, established during the height of national collectivism and consensus under the shadow of the Cold War. This, in turn, built upon earlier internationalist legacies fostered by the failed forerunner of the United Nations, the League of Nations as Paula Fass has shown.

Realising the ‘child at risk’

The 1989 Children Act consolidated a number of shifts during the 1980s which were cemented into the 1990s. Families continued to be understood as the building block of society – despite its questionable existence – and children were situated within them. They were not individuals. The state was empowered to determine what their best interests were, and whether families met them, or could even meet them. If parents or families constituted a risk to their children – physically, sexually, emotionally or materially unable to meet their needs – then the state would not hesitate to intervene on their behalf. In their best interests. Similarly, if children posed a risk to society – despite its spurious basis – then they, too, would be removed from family care. Law and order must prevail. In the depths of the social and economic deprivation of 1980s and 1990s Britain, this constituted a firm neoliberal commitment to a strong state when necessary – when the family was challenged – but otherwise with minimum welfare services, resources or social security, which were dispensable. There would be no milk to stifle the entrepreneurial spirit of the next generation. They would, as Rachel Rosen notes, embody neoliberal subjectivities.

Nigel Parton rightly sees the 1989 Act as more firmly demarcating the state’s responsibilities around child welfare which expanded in the post-1945 period, and longer, more historic responsibilities about parental duties and child protection which stretched back to the Victorian Poor Laws. Mediating this frontier were the professional staff of the child welfare state: social services. Another crucial function of the Act was to deprofessionalise social work and erode their discretion in using their expertise to understand the best interests of the child. If these interests could be reduced to risk factors of the family or the child, these could be measured, assessed and acted upon accordingly. Equally, the performance of such organisations could be gauged and improved outcomes delivered. Bloated public services and paternalistic bureaucrats represented by the spectre of the social worker were, according to the New Right, equally part of the problem.

As with milk snatching, New Right attacks on social work began far earlier than the 1980s and 1990s. The well-publicised death of Maria Colwell at the hands of her stepfather in 1973, despite being under the watch of social services, led to the intervention of the Conservative Secretary of State Sir Keith Joseph and the formation of an inquiry. At the time such inquires were novel. Harry Ferguson remarks how common it was for most social workers to experience the death of a child under their supervision before the 1970s, yet no inquiry on their care was ever called. The very decision to subject social work professional decisions to public scrutiny was emblematic of the political direction of the New Right on the systems of the welfare state.

Crafting neoliberal child protection

The ensuing witch hunt put ‘social work on trial’ according to Ian Butler and Mark Drakeford, politically exposing the weaknesses and failings of professional discretion to protect children from harm, risk and danger. Such inquiries were to be a hallmark of the 1980s and 1990s, proliferating in number and volume as noted by David Jones. Each was an indictment of the inadequacies, inconsistencies and injustices surrounding the death of another child and the failings of professionals and the state. Malcolm Page. Heidi Koseda. Jasmine Beckford. Kimberley Carlile. Tyra Henry. Among many more, culminating most publicly with Victoria Climbié at the turn of the millennium. The Act was as much about transforming the state as the best interests of the child.

Although the New Right premised the Act on a strong state in necessary of cases of children at risk or risky children, there were limits. The reverse side of the coin of publicising and politicising child deaths was the unnecessarily heavy hand of the state which too threatened the family. In 1987 in the North East of England the arrival of two new paediatricians led to an explosion in the number of child abuse cases being detected, leading to the removal of 121 children from 57 families. The public outcry prompted their return and yet another inquiry, this time criticising the overbearing response and the problems of intervening based on certain forms of professional evidence alone. Crucially, as Jenny Crane notes, the voice and views of the child in such decisions were integral to informing the damning judgment of the 1988 Butler-Sloss Report. These became a further means of challenging the legitimacy of social work professionalism. The selectivity with which such voices were heard and reproduced, of course, reflected judgments about their best interests which were in keeping with the ideology of the New Right.

Crucially, in order to maintain a balance between necessary intervention and the identification of risk by the strong state with safeguards for families, the 1989 Act created a new machinery for child protection – not welfare – rooted in legalism. The unreliability of social work discretion, their expertise and evidence was reified through the reinvention of a series of orders which captured, assessed and acted upon types of risk. The onus on protection removed considerations of welfare for children and became a means of articulating the respective rights and responsibilities of parents and children within the family in the eyes of the state.

Conclusion

The 1989 Act is particularly significant because much of it remains in force in present day England and still informs child protection thinking. It serves as a fulcrum in state intervention in children across the 1980s and 1990s. Rhetorically, it reflects lip service to the voices, views and rights of the child to act as individuals. In reality, it residualises their welfare to protection from a series of risks framed around notionally dangerous families, or to protect the wider public from the threat they pose to society. However fictitious such a society may be in the eyes of the New Right. The Act is central in the growing neoliberalisation of childhood which continued apace into the 2000s and 2010s. The collective responsibility and legitimacy of the state to wider welfare was eroded.

Finally, this is not to present the post-war period of social democracy, collectivism and the welfare state which ‘rolled forward’ as a ‘golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s. It was not. My own work on ‘problem families’ shows that social work and the state continued to condemn families for the poverty they experienced and the impacts it had on their children. And, despite claims to the contrary, child poverty continued and abounded. Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith exposed its depths and extend in the 1960s, leading to the formation of the Child Poverty Action Group during the height of the success of the post-war welfare consensus. The attention of the state disproportionately fell on already marginalised groups in society, meaning some children remained of limited value. Milk or not.

However, the difference of the 1980s and 1990s was the creation of a child protection system which removed the obligation of government to consider the social and economic welfare of children. Responsibility was residualised and reduced to the management of categories of risk, which restructured the state around individuals against the collective. At the same time society was demonstrably being transformed. Child poverty is family poverty. Inequalities intensified and increased dramatically during the period due to the economic policies of the Thatcher, Major and Blair Governments which prioritised individuals, markets and competition. The childhoods of the 1980s and 1990s reflected what Bob Jessop and others term a tale of two nations: those with and of the new political vision of society, and those without.

With apologies to Stephen Crossley for the title.

References

Deniz Arzuk. “By way of introduction” in Changing Childhoods, 26 May 2020.
Ian Butler and Mark Drakeford. Social Work on Trial: The Colwell Inquiry and the State of Welfare. Bristol: Policy Press, 2011.
Jennifer Crane. Child Protection in England, 1960-2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Paula S. Fass, “A historical context for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 633: 17-29, 2011.
Harry Ferguson. Protecting Children in Time: Child Abuse, Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Bob Jessop, Kevin Bonnett, Tom Ling and Simon Bromley. Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations. Cambridge: Polity, 1988.
David N. Jones. Serious Case Reviews in Child Protection: Historical Reflections. Nottingham: Virtual Staff College, 2015.
Michael Lambert. “‘Problem families” and the post-war welfare state in the North West of England, 1943-74” unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University, 2017.
Michael Lambert. “Between ‘families in trouble’ and ‘children at risk’: historicising ‘troubled family’ policy in England since 1945” in Children and Society 33(1): 82-91, 2019.
Nigel Parton. The Politics of Child Protection: Contemporary Developments and Future Directions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Nigel Parton. “Reflections on ‘governing the family’: the close relationship between child protection and social work in advanced Western societies – the example of England” in Families, Relationships and Societies, 1(1): 87-101, 2012.
Rachel Rosen. “Pardon us for caring: childhood and the neoliberal project” in Changing Childhoods, 23 June 2020.
Carolyn Steedman. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Women. London: Virago, 1986.
Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith. The Poor and the Poorest. London: Bell, 1965.

About the Author

Michael Lambert is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Inequalities and the Research and Engagement Lead for the Centre for Alternatives to Social and Economic Inequalities at Lancaster University. His work focuses on experiences of policy, marginality and inequality in the history of the welfare state. He completed his doctoral thesis on ‘problem families’ in 2017 and has taught Early Childhood Studies at Liverpool Hope University (2016-17) and worked as a researcher on the Governance of Health at the University of Liverpool (2017-19).

Cite this article as: Michael Lambert, “Realising the ‘child and risk’, crafting neoliberal child protection: the 1989 Children Act,” in Changing Childhoods, 7 July 2020, https://changingchildhoods.com/the-1989-children-act/