Summary: | This work argues that in spite of the 1989 Children Act, child protection social work in England is still characterized by high professional anxiety, political ambiugity and a feeling of stuckness. As a result of confusing relationships among the law, the citizen, social work and the state, and also the government's ambilavence toward social intervention in families, the authors contend that: social work has been bureaucratized; social workers have been pilloried in the press and castigated by government; and that vulnerable children are no safer, while the log-jam of unallocated child protection cases has not diminished.
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