The personal social services did not receive a statutory mandate to undertake preventive work with deprived children until 1963. This paper looks at the history of child care services in the ...nineteenth and twentieth centuries to find some explanations for the delay in promoting prevention. The two major child care systems during the Victorian era were the Poor Law and the voluntary children's societies. In terms of methods of care and philosophy, the two are often held as contrasts. But, in terms of wishing to rescue children from evil parents and of changing their characters by educating them while completely removed from their natural families, they had much in common. Thus, both state and voluntary services exerted a strong force opposed to policies of helping natural parents to cope with their own or of rehabilitating them. Changing social and political conditions in the early part of the twentieth century appeared to give the prospect of different practices. However, these failed to emerge and some explanations are put forward with particular reference to the survival of the Poor Law and the stagnation of the voluntary bodies. Finally, an analysis is made of what steps had to be taken at the end of the 1930s if prevention was to become a part of the social services.
Family man Holman, Bob
New statesman & society,
12/1995, Letnik:
8, Številka:
382
Journal Article
The author explains why he turned his back on a university professorship twenty years ago and went to work on a council estate as a neighbourhood family worker; he recounts a typical working week ...with one family.
The Child and Family in Context: Developing ecological practice in disadvantaged communities Owen, Gill and Gordon, Jack Russell House Publishing 2007 166 pages £18.95 (plus £1.50 p&p)
