The protection of children in time: child protection and the lives and deaths of children in child abuse cases in socio-historical perspective

For some 20 years now in the UK, assessments of the effectiveness of child protection have been carried out under the shadow of child abuse inquiries. Yet, relatively little is known about social work and matters of child life and death that preceded the first major inquiry into the death of Maria Colwell in 1973. This paper offers a socio-historical perspective on child protection and the lives and deaths of children in child abuse cases, and excavates the foundations upon which the major developments of the past two decades have proceeded. The emergence and development of a'modern' ideology of child protection, which held that it is possible and desirable for social intervention to work to protect children in time, is traced to processes that unfolded from the late nineteenth century. Statistical evidence on the numbers of children who have died in cases across the twentieth century is examined and analysed in the context of social theories of modernity and perspectives on the changing ways in which child death has (literally) been handled by professionals and knowlege about the problem managed over time.