Carl Purcell, of the Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit, King’s College London, reflects on a recent meeting of the Social Work History Network (17 June 2024). (791 words)
At a recent seminar organised by the Social Work History Network Dr Michael Lambert, Professor June Thoburn and Professor Marian Brandon reflected on the history of the concept child ‘neglect’ and how this has been redefined and responded to by policymakers and social workers.
The evacuation of children from towns and cities during the second world war exposed the appalling suffering of many children living in desperate poverty. Lady Allen of Hartwood was spurred to write a letter to The Times that provoked a remarkable political response. Following the Curtis Report (1946), and subsequent inquiries, the Children Act 1948 established local authority Children’s Departments to make arrangements when children, including neglected children, needed to be received in to care. Subsequently, the Children and Young Persons (Amendment) Act 1952 provided powers to actively investigate neglect.
Many health and social work professionals working in this space located the underlying causes of neglect in the personal characteristics of parents. Jones wrote: “Their lives are characterised by dirt, disintegration and disorder. They are often shiftless, apathetic, irresponsible to an almost incredible degree”[1]. But some social policy writers were critical of this perspective. Barbara Wootton argued: “About the only common characteristics of these families, it seems, are the financial ones”[2].
This broader perspective came to underpin subsequent legislative reforms and inquiries, including the Children and Young Person’s Act 1963 and the report of the Seebohm Committee in 1968. Both aimed to strike a balance between ‘rescuing’ children and ‘preventative’ work with families that might be struggling. June Thoburn recalled having responsibility for the management of six council houses when working as a local authority Child Care Officer in this time. This was also an era when local authority Social Services Departments, created following the Seebohm report, were instructed to plan for annual budget increases of 10 per cent[3].
However, the inquiry into the death of Maria Colwell published in 1974 is commonly viewed as a turning point. Since then, social work reforms have typically responded to failings in professional practice identified in child abuse inquiries including that of Maria Colwell and the many that followed over subsequent decades. Today, social workers following safeguarding and child protection procedures must ‘assess’ the potential consequences of neglect alongside a long list of other ‘risks’ to the safety and well-being of children and young people.
These assessment procedures promote a ‘snapshot’ view of neglect that appears disconnected from the complex challenges associated with poverty. Having analysed many recent Serious Case Reviews, Marian Brandon commented that neglect is very often mentioned. However, neglect is rarely identified as a significant factor leading to the death of a child and is hardly ever explicitly connected to poverty. A recent review of the literature on social work perceptions of child neglect found that ‘tokenistic’ references to poverty were often relegated to the ‘environmental’ sections of assessments[4]. This chimes with Kate Morris and colleagues’ memorable comment that poverty has become ‘the wallpaper of practice’[5]
This is not to blame social workers for losing sight of poverty. The procedural reforms that began in the 1970s must also be viewed in the context of cuts to spending on welfare services and declining political and public confidence in public service professionals. Successive waves of political discourse on ‘cycles of deprivation’, the ‘underclass’ and ‘troubled families’ have also downplayed the financial struggles of families and resurface old arguments about ‘inadequate’ parenting.
But the work of the Child Welfare Inequalities Project[6] has provided strong evidence to demonstrate the link between poverty and child welfare outcomes. The case for a renewal of ‘poverty aware practice’ is compelling. Afterall, it is (nearly) always about the money.
Dr Carl Purcell is Research Fellow at the Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit, King’s College London.
Slides and a recording of this event are available on the event page. More about the Social Work History Network.
An edited version of these reflections was published in Professional Social Work. This text is made available with the agreement of PSW. Purcell, Carl (2024) “‘It’s (nearly) always about the money’.” Professional Social Work (November/December 2024): 32.
[1] Jones, D. (1950) ‘Family Service Units for problem families’, Eugenics Review, 41(4): 171.
[2] Wootton, B. (1959) Social Science and Social Pathology. London: George Allen and Unwin.
[3] Jones, R. (2020) A History of the Personal Social Services in England: Feast, Famine and the Future. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
[4] Jennifer Gibbs, Barry Coughlan, Tessa Morgan, Arbenita Mikushnica, Samantha Phippard, Francesca Crozier-Roche, Taliah Drayak, David Graham, Jack Smith, Robbie Duschinsky, Social Workers’ Perceptions of the Nature of Child Neglect: A Systematic Literature Review, The British Journal of Social Work, 2024;, bcae102, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcae102
[5] Morris, K., Mason, W., Bywaters, P., Featherstone, B., Daniel, B., Brady, G., Bunting, L., Hooper, J., Mirza, N., Scourfield, J. and Webb, C. (2018) ‘Social work, poverty, and child welfare interventions’, Child & Family Social Work, 23(3), pp. 364-372.
[6] Bywaters, P., Scourfield, J., Jones, C., Sparks, T., Elliott, M., Hooper, J., McCartan, C., Shapira, M., Bunting, L., & Daniel, B. (2020). Child welfare inequalities in the four nations of the UK. Journal of Social Work, 20(2), 193-215. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468017318793479