Daring to criticise child protection policies

Daring to criticise child protection policies | Heather Piper | spiked

Fifty years ago, C Wright Mills deplored the widespread absence of a sociological imagination, and reminded us that the personal is always political – even if in complex ways.


Recent reports have provided contemporary evidence of the validity of these concerns, indicating a lack of awareness and imagination in the way that some organisations respond to perceived threats to their interests. This will become increasingly significant given government policy to permit a wide range of social and educational provision to move into the control of the private sector and charitable organisations. Reflection on the flawed way in which we work on and argue about social policy and practice, in which motives are hidden, key distinctions obscured, and unhelpful labels (left, right, libertarian) deployed, has been invigorated by some recent personal experience.