‘Lifestyle’ as the new wayward: child welfare, sexual exploitation and young people
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Child abuse reviews and research explain a plethora of reasons why sexual exploitation continues to occur undetected within the child welfare system. The evidence includes young people being difficult to work with, child welfare workers having limited knowledge about exploitation and inadequate staffing levels. In this article, I argue that there is also a practice-based epistemological failure, specifically a failure in how child welfare workers ‘come to know’ girls and young people. I draw on formal reviews of child abuse and interrogate a common word in these reviews: ‘lifestyle’. I apply a genealogical approach, demonstrating that ‘lifestyle’ is tied to an epistemological failure, a failure that is acutely consequential to practice. I discuss how the word ‘lifestyle’ rests in culture, that is, in the social history, social structures and social imaginary of the female gender. I argue that the use of this word dismisses the very social context in which it arises, erasing relations of subject formation and the socio-political context of violence against girls and young women.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".