‘FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN’: MAKING SENSE OF CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD IN THE CONTEXT OF CHILD PROTECTION
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ideas of childhood and children are arguably at the very centre of child protection policy, theory and practice, and yet very little attention has been placed on discourses of children and childhood in this field. In this paper we begin to examine how discourses of childhood are reproduced in a child protection context by looking at the talk of practising child protection workers and supervisors in Ontario, Canada. We found that child welfare workers' talk about children suggests that two discourses about children dominate: a discourse of the child as vulnerable and in need of rescue and a discourse of the child as a rights‐bearing individual. We will argue that both these discourses contribute to a symbolic extraction of the child from the family and in this way they function to distance workers from the emotional impact of their practice with parents and children. We will consider the implications of this conceptual extraction of the child from the family and make a case for a more complex understanding of children that reflects the intertwined relationship between parents and children. Lastly, a practice approach to child protection that helps workers to absorb the subjectivities of both children and their parents will be proposed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".