6. Thinking and Acting Constructively in Child Protection Nigel Parton

My introduction to social constructionist ideas was very much theoretical and, primarily, sociological via my introduction to the book by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) called The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. This came towards the end of my social work degree in 1973 when studying a course on social work organizations. One of the key texts was by David Silverman (1970), which provided a very demanding tour of different theoretical perspectives on organizations, in which he outlined an “action frame of reference” and which drew heavily on The Social Construction of Reality. A small group of us were determined to try and make sense of the book, and I am not going to pretend we found any of it easy! Increasingly, however, I found the book opened up a way of seeing the world that has informed my thinking and practice ever since. In fact, as the years have gone by, I have found the insights provided by Berger and Luckmann ever more helpful. In particular, the discussions of the relationship between the individual and society and the thorny issue of “agency” and “structure” have tremendously helped me understand the nature of social work and opened up creative ways of thinking and acting for me.

As I understood it, Berger and Luckmann took issue with images of society that dominated social theory in the postwar period and which they saw as excessively rationalistic and functional, giving little room for human agency. They were concerned that most social theories had become overly concerned with explaining the impersonal laws of social order rather than how social order was an outcome of social action.

They set themselves two tasks. First, drawing on phenomenological philosophy, they used a range of concepts in order to frame everyday life as a fluid, multiple, precariously negotiated achievement in interaction. Second, they provided a general theory of the social origins and maintenance of social institutions. Their principal thesis was that individuals in interaction create social worlds through their linguistic, symbolic activity for the purpose of providing coherence and purpose to an essentially open-ended, unformed human existence. Society is neither a system, nor a mechanism, nor an organism; it is a symbolic construct composed of ideas, meanings, and language, which is all the time changing through human action while also imposing both constraints and possibilities on human actors. They saw the relationship between the individual and society as operating in two ways: human beings continually construct the world, which then becomes a reality to which they must respond. In acting in the world, we construct and externalize phenomena, which then take on an objective reality of their own and which then are internalized by us and thus play a key role in the processes of externalization. In this way, the relationship between the individual and society is seen as a dialectic process. Thus, while we are always acting and thereby constructing and changing the world and ourselves, we do so in the context of the institutions and frameworks of meaning handed down by previous generations.

This approach emphasizes the processes through which both individuals define themselves and their environments together with the processes whereby social institutions are themselves created. It encourages us to problematize the “obvious” and the “taken for granted”; it challenges the view that conventional knowledge is neutral and unbiased and asks us to recognize that the categories we use to make sense of and operate in the world are historically and culturally specific, and therefore vary over time and place, and subject to change. The approach provides a way of relating to the world whereby creative spaces for analysis and intervention are continually opened up.

I have drawn on such thinking over the years to try and make sense of and develop critical analyses and positive interventions at both the policy and day-to-day practice levels. I will look at each in turn.

When I started as a social worker, the department was experiencing considerable change following the introduction of the newly established departments of social services in April 1971 and the reorganization of local government in England in April 1974. Even so, I felt an excitement and optimism associated with the explicit recognition that social service departments were now large and significant players in local authorities and that the profession of social work was key to its operation and development. It was as if social work had come of age. However, as I commented in the Preface to The Politics of Child Abuse (Parton, 1985: ix):

I was very conscious that the public inquiry into the tragic death of Maria Colwell (Secretary of State, 1974) was not only an inquiry into the way this particular case was (mis)handled but was, in effect, a public inquiry into the newly emerging profession of social work itself and which had seemed to be found so wanting. Rapidly and dramatically, social work and child abuse had become issues of considerable media, and public and political interest and concern (Franklin and Parton, 1991); this has continued ever since (Franklin and Parton, 2001). It was as if the optimism evident in social work had been dealt a major blow by one significant event and policy makers, managers, and practitioners were required to rethink and reorder their priorities and the ways they worked in the light of the new procedures, guidelines, and training that were being introduced. Social workers were being required to take the lead responsibility for responding to a newly discovered social problem—child abuse—which required new skills, new forms of intervention, and new organizational arrangements to deal with it.

However, I was uneasy about what was happening to both clients and social workers. I was especially concerned that the nature of this new problem did not seem as clear-cut and self-evident, as was suggested in most of the training and practice procedures and guidelines that were made available at the time. Nor was I convinced that many of the new policies and practices that were being introduced were as humane as was assumed. They seemed to have a number of unintended consequences that were deleterious for all concerned—not least for many of the children and parents who were on the receiving end of the changes being introduced. Increasingly, I felt the need to develop a more critical analysis of what was happening with the hope of formulating new insights and perspectives as the basis for developing new ideas for taking policy and practice forward.

I wrote The Politics of Child Abuse to engage with these issues. The material was organized into two parts: Part One, The History; and Part Two, A Critique. Part One built on earlier work (Parton, 1979; 1981) and was concerned with trying to explain why the problem of child abuse had emerged as such a crucial one for welfare practitioners from the early 1970s onwards, what the nature of the problem was, how this had changed, and what the implications were for policy and practice. The analysis drew upon perspectives and concepts developed in the sociological study of social problems since the early 1960s in the United States but which had rarely been used for the analysis of social problems in the United Kingdom. The starting point was that we cannot begin to understand the nature of child abuse without analyzing the nature of the category itself, how this had been constructed and then recognized as a social problem requiring state intervention. The approach offered by Fuller and Myers in 1941 was found instructive, where they differentiated between social problems as objective conditions and social problems as subjective definitions.

A social problem is a condition which is defined by a considerable number of persons as a deviation from some social norm which they cherish. Every social problem thus consists of an objective condition and a subjective definition. The objective condition is a verifiable situation, which can be checked as to existence and magnitude (proportions) by impartial and trained observers. The subjective definition is the awareness of certain individuals that the condition is a threat to certain cherished values (Fuller and Myers, 1941, 320, original emphasis).

While Fuller and Myers did suggest that the existence of objective conditions is insufficient on its own for a phenomenon to be recognized as a social problem, they stopped short of arguing that objective conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient. Yet as Blumer (1971) and Spector and Kitsuse (1973) subsequently argued, a concern with what might constitute the objective conditions may deflect attention from what they felt should be the central focus of the sociological study of social problems—to account for the emergence, maintenance, history, and conceptualization of what is defined as a social problem and what should be done about it. The publication of Spector and Kitsuse’s Constructing Social Problems in 1977 proved to be something of a watershed in establishing social constructionist approaches as the dominant, though controversial, perspective in the sociological study of social problems in the United States (see for example Holstein and Miller, 1993; Miller and Holstein, 1993). It was this social constructionist approach to social problems that was the primary influence upon the approach to Part One of The Politics of Child Abuse.

My empirical work was based on an extensive search for and analysis of published material, including research and policy statements, on child abuse, or “the battered baby syndrome” and “non-accidental injury” to children, as it was usually referred to in the 1960s and 1970s in England. It also included content analysis of newspaper coverage and interviews with a number of key informants who had played important roles in policy and practice developments on the issue in England during the period. It became clear that the key development in the modern “(re)discovery” of child abuse in the 1960s was the publication of the paper by Henry Kempe and his colleagues in Denver, Colorado, in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1962 on “the battered child syndrome.”

Clearly the term had been specifically chosen in order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, including relevant professionals, particularly pediatricians. There was no reference to any possible legal, social, or deviancy implications of the phenomenon—the problem was medicalized, so that doctors and medical technologies, for example the use of the X-ray to identify old and otherwise hidden injuries, were seen as key to identifying and diagnosing the problem. Not only did the issue receive wide coverage in the United States, but it also attracted the attention of a number of pediatricians in England, as well as the NSPCC (the National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children), which in 1968 set up the Battered Child Research Unit to carry out research on the problem and bring it to the attention of professionals in the child care field.

However, I demonstrated that it was the public inquiry into the death of Maria Colwell (Secretary of State, 1974) which was to prove crucial in mobilizing public, professional, political, and, crucially, media concern about the issue, thus establishing it as a major social problem. What became apparent was that it was not so much the death of Maria that attracted attention, outside the local area of Brighton where she lived, but the inquiry which was to transform the case into something of a cause célèbre and a national scandal of significant proportions. For example, The Times newspaper had very little coverage of either Maria’s death or the case prior to the announcement of the public inquiry on May 25, 1973. Between October 10, 1973, when the inquiry opened, and December 7, when it closed, The Times carried 320 paragraphs on the inquiry and the problem more generally. This was primarily concerned with providing a detailed coverage of the evidence to the inquiry and more general comment. There was coverage on forty-three days between those dates. The publication of the final report the following year also attracted considerable space (see The Times, September 5, 1974) and included 112 paragraphs of the main editorial comment, a summary of the report, and comment articles. The inquiry was as much, if not more, about the failures of health and welfare professionals—particularly social workers—as it was about child abuse per se. In many ways, the inquiry is best characterized as an inquiry into social work policy and practice and in the process catapulted social work into the public spotlight in a way that had never happened before. From this point on in England, the problem of child abuse and the problem of social work were to be seen and experienced as closely interrelated.

I also tried to demonstrate how these developments could be related to a more general social anxiety that seemed to be developing about the decline of the family, the growth of violence, and concerns that inadequate families and innocent victims were being let down by “woolly do-gooders”—particularly social workers. All of which reflected and fed into changes in the economy and the (welfare) state, which were to become even more significant later in the decade. In the process, I argued that the way the problem was socially constructed depended on a very particular set of assumptions and explanations. The “disease model,” as I called it, with its emphasis on individualized identification, prevention, and treatment, was to prove dominant in influencing the way the problem was understood and influencing what was seen as the most appropriate way of responding.

The focus of Part Two of The Politics of Child Abuse was to develop a critical analysis of the disease model and outline alternative approaches. I attempted to make the underlying values and assumptions of the model explicit, together with its inadequacies at the conceptual and empirical levels. In this model, child abuse was conceptualized as a pathological phenomenon with its roots in the personality or character of the abusing parent. Social factors were only seen in terms of the characteristics associated with abusive individuals or families. In effect, the model ignored social arrangements and denied that social and economic factors played any significant part. A major focus of Part Two was to draw attention to social context in two ways. First, drawing on a range of secondary data from this country and the United States, it underlined the link between social inequality, poverty, and child abuse. It argued that the stresses, frustrations, and lack of opportunities, for some parents, were major factors in explaining why the incidence of abuse was so much more concentrated in the most deprived sections of society. I argued that the traditional concentration on dangerous individuals failed to consider the significance of dangerous conditions. Second, I argued that this focus on individual causes and manifestations of abuse failed to recognize the way in which the non-individualistic practices of industrial, corporate, and government agencies could and did cause harm to children but in ways which were never defined as child abuse. In effect, arguments about the nature, causes, and consequences of abuse had ignored abuse at the institutional and structural levels.

At the time of publication, The Politics of Child Abuse was seen by many as a challenging but somewhat peripheral critique of contemporary policy and practice. However, this was to change as the second half of the 1990s witnessed a major debate in the United Kingdom concerned with “the refocusing of children’s services” (see Parton, 1997). The debate was primarily prompted by the publication by the Audit Commission of its report Seen But Not Heard: Coordinating Child Health and Social Services for Children in Need, in 1994, and the publication by the Department of Health, the following year, of Child Protection: Messages from Research. The latter summarized the findings from 20 recently completed research studies on child protection practice (the majority commissioned by the Department of Health) and their implications for policy and practice. It was to prove key in prompting a major rethink of the most appropriate ways to respond to concerns about child abuse in England since the Maria Colwell case.

The definition of child abuse, or child maltreatment as it was called in Messages from Research, is of particular interest. Rather than fall back on more traditional approaches it argued that child abuse was a socially constructed phenomenon, and quoted one of the research studies (Gibbons, Conroy, and Bell, 1995, 12) that:

In fact, the study by Gibbons, Conroy, and Bell (1995) referenced The Politics of Child Abuse to support and legitimate such a position. It seemed that social constructionist perspectives had moved center stage and that The Politics of Child Abuse was implicated in this.

However, there were more fundamental ways in which some of the central themes in The Politics of Child Abuse became reflected in emerging developments. Many of the concerns about child protection practice that were first articulated in Messages from Research formed the basis of central government guidance in Working Together to Safeguard Children (DH et al., 1999; HM Government, 2006). Again, this reflected many of the central arguments in The Politics of Child Abuse. It stated that the government wished to shift the balance in the provision of children’s services and aimed to promote the central message that child protection work must be placed firmly within the context of wider services for children in need and that children should not be routed inappropriately into the child protection system in order to gain access to services. It argued that many families who find themselves enmeshed in the child protection system suffered multiple disadvantages and that they needed help at an earlier stage to tackle their problems. The approach was based on a “social stress” model of child abuse, whereby it was assumed that if the stresses can be addressed at an earlier stage, child abuse can be averted. Child abuse was conceptualized as lying along a “continuum,” so that service responses should be differentiated to meet different levels and types of “need” and the form of intervention should recognize different thresholds of intervention. This assumes that the provision of family support at an earlier stage will not only prevent parents maltreating their children, but that it would divert many cases away from the formalized child protection system. In effect child abuse becomes a subset within the overall continuum of children in need.

While I was sympathetic to much of what such a refocusing aimed to achieve, I also had some fundamental questions and concerns about some of the changes being introduced. In part these arose from my growing uneasiness about some of the analyses originally developed in The Politics of Child Abuse; I now consider these problems to lie at the heart of some of my concerns about the attempts to refocus children’s services in England from the late 1990s onwards.

I had become aware that The Politics of Child Abuse was inadequate in three major respects: its failure to address sexual abuse; its difficulties in taking into account the dimension of gender; and, perhaps most crucially, its silence in relation to children (Parton, 1990). First, in concentrating the analysis on the ways the problem of child abuse and responses to it had been constructed, I had given insufficient attention to the causes of the original (abusive) behavior and, therefore, to the impact on the child. Second, while helpful in demonstrating the possible relationship between physical abuse and neglect and wider issues of poverty and social deprivation, I had difficulty explaining why abuse occurred in middle-class and affluent families. And, third, I had real difficulty in accounting for sexual abuse, which has little clear relationship with poverty and social deprivation but does have a clear relationship with gender. While a social stress model may be appropriate to develop our understanding of physical abuse and neglect, it has serious flaws in relation to sexual abuse. Thus, in the same way that I have identified significant difficulties in the analysis in The Politics of Child Abuse, I have also identified a number of similar problems with current central government guidance as it attempts to operationalize the refocusing of children’s services in terms of family support in England (Parton and Wattam, 1999).

At the time of writing The Politics of Child Abuse, the issue of child sexual abuse had barely entered the public and political domains; however, this was quickly to change with the events in Cleveland in the north east of England in mid-1987, which prompted the Secretary of State to set up a major public inquiry, published the following year (Secretary of State, 1988).² This was to be a major focus for Governing the Family (Parton, 1991). In some respects, Governing the Family can be read as simply taking further the story and analysis in The Politics of Child Abuse. In other respects, however, it is rather different because, during the late 1980s, a major shift had been taking place in the way the state aimed to prevent harm to children. Rather than focus almost exclusively upon trying to prevent child abuse as previously, it now seemed the focus was on a new activity—child protection—where the latter tries to combine attempts to protect children from danger while also trying to protect the privacy of the family from unwarrantable state interventions. The aim of Governing the Family was to try to understand the nature of these changes.

As I argued in the Preface to Governing the Family, in order to make sense of these changes, a rather different conceptual and analytic toolkit was required compared to that used in The Politics of Child Abuse:

Rather than being centrally concerned with analysing the emergence and impact of the problem of child abuse as previously, I am here concerned with, on the one hand, discussing a broader range of legal, regulatory, and interventive strategies, while on the other, analysing in some detail the debates, recommendations for reform and the processes of policy change. The book therefore combines both a different conceptual framework and a closer attention to detail in order to explain the emergence of a new discourse focused around notions of child protection and family autonomy (Parton, 1991: ix).

I wanted to understand and explain how certain issues in child welfare in England in the 1980s had been framed in various public and official documents and debates. How were the problems conceived, and what were seen as the best ways of addressing these? In particular, I was keen to identify the key discourses that were being developed to explain and address the problems and the processes whereby these were “made up” and constituted. Again I was involved with interviewing key informants and analyzing newspaper coverage and a whole range of policy documents and inquiry reports as before, but this time it was combined with a more detailed analysis of a range of internal government and pressure group records and discussion papers and a close reading of Hansard, the verbatim record of parliamentary debates and committees at Westminster (the U.K. parliament). This time, however, rather than draw only on social constructionist approaches derived from the sociology of social problems, the study was much more influenced by the approaches developed by Michel Foucault (1977; 1991) and Jacques Donzelot (1980) in terms of their analysis of discourse, the “tutelary complex,” and the nature of “the social,” together with the work of a number of post-Foucaldian scholars working in England, particularly Nikolas Rose (1993) and Peter Miller (Miller and Rose, 1990) who were analyzing the contemporary changing nature of government policy.

Miller and Rose (1990) suggested that an analysis of policy should give primary attention to discourse in two respects. First, policy should be located in discussions about what is conceived as the proper ends and means of government and how these are articulated. Second, discourse should be seen as the technology of thought, whereby particular devices of writing, listing, numbering, and computing, for example, make an issue into a knowable, calculable, and administrative object. It was through certain procedures that the “objects” of the family, child welfare, and child abuse were presented in a form that made them amenable for intervention and regulation. Language provided a key mechanism whereby policies and practices are represented, refined, and made subject to action.

The central argument I developed in Governing the Family was that the period had witnessed important changes in the relationships and hierarchies of authority between different agencies and professionals in key areas of decision making. While at the time of its modern (re)emergence in the 1960s, child abuse was constituted as essentially a socio-medical problem, where the expertise of doctors was seen as key, from the late 1980s onwards, it was constituted as a socio-legal problem, where legal expertise took preeminence and where the issues were framed in terms of child protection. Whereas previously the concern was with diagnosing, curing, and preventing the “disease” or “syndrome,” increasingly the emphasis became investigating, assessing, and weighing “forensic evidence.” While social workers and social service departments continued to be seen as the lead agency throughout the period, the focus and priorities of both their work and that of other charitable and statutory agencies in the child welfare field had been reconfigured as a result.

I concluded that the contemporary discourse of child protection could be characterized in terms of its emphasis on the need to investigate and differentiate cases of “high risk,” in a context in which notions of working together were set out in increasingly complex yet prescriptive procedural guidelines and in which the work was framed by a narrow emphasis on legalism and the need for forensic evidence. Such a characterization was further substantiated in a subsequent collaborative study, based on secondary analysis of social work files (see Parton, Thorpe, and Wattam, 1997), where it was established that the overriding concern of child welfare practitioners was to try and identify high-risk cases, differentiate these from the rest, and allocate resources accordingly. The research and analysis I carried out for Governing the Family also helped me clarify and identify what I came to see as the central tensions that lie at the core of child protection policy and practice. For the question which has to be continually addressed, and which has been a central issue for the liberal state since the mid-nineteenth century, is how can we devise a legal basis for the power to intervene into the privacy of the family to protect children which does not convert a sizeable proportion of families into clients of the state? Such a problem is posed by the contradictory demands of, on the one hand, ensuring that the family is experienced by its members as autonomous and the primary sphere for rearing children, while on the other recognizing a need for intervention in some families in which they are seen as failing in this primary task and in a context in which such laws are supposed to act as the general norms applicable to all. However, the way these challenges are responded to varies at different times and in different jurisdictions. These are significant issues for liberalism, and thus illustrate why they are so sensitive and potentially volatile politically as well as personally and professionally. For liberalism is based on a vision of society in which government is based on the exercise of freedom and in which the relationship between liberty and discipline, freedom and rule, while interdependent, is subject to continual renegotiation and fine balancing. I have subsequently analyzed these issues and their implications in greater detail, including the strategic significance of the idea of risk—its assessment, monitoring, and management—and why it had become so central to policy and practice (Parton, 1996; 1999).

My interest in analyzing the changes in thinking, policy, and practice in relation to child abuse and child protection was, in part, informed by my parallel interest in trying to understand the changing nature and role of social work. Perhaps one of my underlying assumptions throughout has been that the changes in social work in the United Kingdom over the past thirty years have been so intimately related to the issue of child abuse, that in order to understand the former an analysis of the latter is key. Engaging in these projects, I have drawn on a number of ideas and conceptual frameworks derived from social constructionism and social theory. During the 1990s, I pursued these ideas even more explicitly in terms of how a number of debates and developments in social theory might contribute to our understanding of social work directly rather than only through my discussions of child abuse.

The paper which first outlined the possibilities of such analyses (Parton, 1994a) drew upon the theoretical framework and key concepts used in Governing the Family but refined to take account of my growing interest in social theory with debates about postmodernity. The discussion of postmodernity and social work was further developed in another paper published the same year (Parton, 1994b). The rationale for developing these ideas about postmodernity were made explicit a few years later.

While postmodern perspectives are primarily united by a number of cultural projects that proclaim a commitment to heterogeneity, fragmentation, and difference, it is perhaps their critiques of modernity that have proved most influential and contentious. Modernity, as a summary term, is seen to refer to the cluster of social, economic, and political systems that emerged in the West with the Enlightenment in the late-eighteenth century. Unlike the premodern, modernity assumed that human order is neither natural nor God-given, but is vulnerable and contingent. However, by the development and application of science, nature could be subject to human control. The distinguishing features of modernity are seen to be: the understanding of history as having a definite and progressive direction; the attempt to develop universal categories of experience; the idea that reason can provide a basis for all activities; and that the nation state could coordinate and advance such developments for the whole society. The two crucial elements of modernity in the post-Enlightenment period are thus seen to be the progressive union of scientific objectivity and politico-economic rationality. In the modern frame, the goal is to produce knowledge about a chosen aspect of the physical or social world by which we can claim greater certainty. At that point we can confer a sense of truth about that knowledge, and also confer on the people producing knowledge (for example, scientists or professionals) the status of holders-of-truth, and thus experts about that aspect of the world. As David Howe (1994) has suggested, social work was in many ways a child of modernity.

Increasingly, however, in social work and elsewhere, it seemed to me that we were now inhabiting a world that had become disoriented, disturbed, and subject to doubt. The pursuit of order and control, the promotion of calculability, belief in progress, science, and rationality, and other features so intrinsic to modernity were being undermined. In part this is related to the major social, economic, and cultural transformations that have characterized recent times in terms of globalization, the increasing significance of media, and the widening networks of information technology that transform and transmit knowledge, the changes in modes of consumption and production, and the increased awareness of risk and uncertainty.

More fundamentally, however, it is related to changing notions of ontology (who we are and our sense of being) and epistemology (how we know what we know). It seems that modernity’s promise to deliver order, certainty, and security has been unfulfilled and, increasingly, it is believed there are no transcendental and universal criteria of truth (science), judgment (ethics), and taste (aesthetics). The rejection of the idea that any one theory or system of belief can ever reveal the truth, and the emphasis on the plurality of truth and “the will to truth,” captures some of the essential elements associated with postmodernity. Following Smart, postmodernity, for me, means “living without guarantee, without security and order and with contingency and ambivalence. To put it another way, it means living without illusions and with uncertainty” (Smart, 1999, 16). It was almost as if we were having to come to terms with the full implications of living in and relating to a “socially constructed” world where nothing could be taken for granted.

Postmodernity can thus be characterized by the fragmentation of modernity into forms of institutional pluralism, marked by increasing awareness of difference, contingency, relativism, and ambivalence—all of which modernity sought (and claimed) to have overcome. It is this constant and growing questioning of modern approaches and modern resolutions that I have argued is symptomatic of the postmodern condition; the conception of postmodernity as the condition of modernity coming to its senses, emancipated from false consciousness, is seen as key (Bauman, 1992). Truth thus now takes the guise of “truth” and is centered neither in God’s word (as in the premodern) nor in human reason (as in the modern) but is de-centered and localized so that many truths are possible, depending on different times and different places. In the postmodern, there is thus a considerable destabilization of a core assumption of modernism—that the way something is represented closely reflects its underlying reality. For if nothing is inherently or immutably true, nothing is inherently or immutably real. In a world in which everything is increasingly mediated and relayed via complex systems of representation, the symbols that are used have a life of their own and take on their meaning, not on the basis of what reality they are meant to represent, but the context in which they are used.

Thus, and as with social construction, an understanding of language is central to approaches which are sympathetic to the postmodern, for instead of merely being a tool that points to objects, language is seen as mediating everything that is known. Far from having a separate existence, reality is seen as embedded in interpretation so that “truth” is a product of language not reality. An understanding of the part that language plays in the formation of human selves, human thought, and human subjectivity thus underpins postmodern perspectives.

In developing and applying some of these ideas to social work, while I was of the view they could be very suggestive in casting light on the current state of social work and possible ways forward, I was also very conscious of some major potential pitfalls. In particular, such approaches could introduce an unacceptable level of relativism and nihilism into social work, which would have the effect of undermining the enterprise altogether. Further, while it may provide important deconstructive analyses of practice, it is possible that it might never offer anything of a positive nature.

It is in this context that I have found the work of Rosenau (1992) valuable. She has delineated two broad orientations within postmodernism: the skeptical postmodernists and the affirmative postmodernists. She argues that the skeptical postmodernists offer a distrustful, pessimistic, negative, gloomy assessment of contemporary times characterized by fragmentation, disintegration, meaninglessness, an absence of moral parameters, and social chaos—this is clearly of no help if we are serious about trying to make a positive contribution to social work. On the other hand, while the affirmative postmodernists agree with the skeptics’ critique of modernity, particularly in terms of science and rationality, they have a more hopeful, optimistic view of the possibilities of the postmodern age and are positively oriented towards the importance of process. This approach has increasingly informed my thinking in recent years and was first articulated in the paper with Wendy Marshall (Parton and Marshall, 1998). Such an approach is much more open to the potential of practical actions, for it is not just concerned with deconstruction but with construction and reconstruction.

There is a recognition that choice and negotiation are central and that trying to build practical and political solutions lies at the heart of everyday life. Recognizing that subject(s) need to be understood in context(s), it thus recognizes the importance of interdependence and the social and political cultures in which we live. It is not the death of the subject but a recognition of the diverse nature of subjectivities which becomes the focus, for it is argued there has been a widening in the constructability of identities from ascriptive and natural (in the premodern), to socially acquired and quasinatural (in the modern), to chosen and socially negotiated (in the postmodern) (Hollis, 1985). It is argued that because there is such an intimate relationship between language and reality, persons are able to influence their own destiny. They are given agency and the potential to construct their own realities in a way reminiscent of Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality.

Thus, while it is difficult to accommodate the skeptical postmodernist perspective, with its nihilistic stance on truth and other absolutes, within social work, I have found the emphasis of the affirmative postmodernist perspective on truth redefinition, rather than truth denying, is potentially very suggestive. Rosenau’s interpretation of an affirmative postmodern vision demonstrates that, while it cannot offer truth, it is not without content. It is interpretative, and its focus is receptivity, dialogue, and listening to and talking with the other. It reveals paradox, myth, and enigma, and it persuades by showing, reminding, hinting, and evoking, rather than by constructing theories and approximating truth. It suggests that our focus should be narrative, fragmented fantasies and different stories. Social work takes on the guise of persuasive fiction or poetry.

What such an approach demonstrates is that postmodern perspectives are not necessarily bleak or antisocial work but provide novel and creative insights that clearly talk to a number of themes and approaches which have been associated with social work for much of its history. It almost suggests that social work could be (re)interpreted as being postmodern all along. Many social workers will identify with approaches that blur the difference between fact and fiction, history and story, art and science (England, 1986), and which take the view that what an individual perceives or experiences as her or his reality isn’t the reality, but a reality capable of change in a variety of ways.

I became aware that there were a number of attempts to develop and apply the positive elements of such an approach explicitly to social work practice. In the process, a number of themes and issues were illustrated which can be widely applied and developed further in different contexts. Uncertainty is seen as central, for, as Pozatek (1994: 399) suggests, “the acknowledgement of uncertainty is an essential element of the postmodern practice of social work” and that such a position can push workers to make the effort to understand a service user’s experience. A position of uncertainty is seen to represent a more respectful approach to cultural difference, so that social workers should not expect to know in advance what the outcomes of interactions will be. They can, at best, only trigger an effect. A position of uncertainty means that social workers will approach each situation respectful of difference, complexity, and ambiguity. Words are understood by clients according to how they have constructed the reality embodied in the interaction. It is thus essential for practitioners to be aware of this and construct, through dialogue with the client, a shared understanding and reality which they agree represents their interaction. It is an approach that recognizes that language is crucial for constituting the experiences and identity of both the self and the interaction, and which takes seriously the diverse elements of power involved. It is similarly serious about notions of partnership and participation, and enables the views of service users to be prioritized. This is not to say, however, that such issues are self-evident and clear-cut. A commitment to uncertainty, indeterminacy, and unpredictability will reinforce social workers’ continual need to reflexively consider what they are doing, why, and with what possible outcomes.

Sands and Nuccio (1992) similarly identified a number of themes central to postmodern perspectives which could be drawn on in practice. Thus, rather than think and act according to logocentrism, assuming that there is a singular fixed logical order which is “real” or “true,” practitioners need to recognize that there are no essential meanings. Definitions and interpretations are historically contingent and context bound and hence fluid. Similarly, logocentric thought promotes thinking in terms of binary opposites—male/female, black/white, adult/child, true/false—which are seen as mutually exclusive, categorical, and hierarchical, rather than interdependent. Such categories are usually embedded in language in a way that privileges some experiences and marginalizes others. It is thus important to explicitly recognize the importance, but fluid and changing nature, of difference so that the oppressed and devalued can have a voice and we can think and act in terms of both/and relational terms.

One way to recover suppressed meaning is through the key operation of deconstruction, whereby phenomena are continually interrogated, evaluated, overturned, and disrupted. Deconstruction is a way of analyzing texts, language, and narratives that is sensitive to contextual dimensions and marginalized voices. The process of deconstruction recognizes that, while multiple discourses might be available, only a few are heard and are dominant, these being intimately related to the dominant powers/knowledges. When we deconstruct, we do not accept the constructs as given but look at them in relation to their social, historical, and political contexts. Constructs are “problematized” and “decentered.” Through deconstruction, the presumed fixity of phenomena is destabilized, and the perspective of the marginalized can be given voice. It involves, amongst other things, helping people to externalize the problem, examining its influences on their lives, and reconstructing and liberating themselves from it. The notion of possibility (O’Hanlon, 1993) recognizes that things can be changed. A vision of possibility can be used to mobilize people’s potential and competence, and can empower them to reclaim and redefine who they are and how they want to act.

However, we should not assume that postmodern and constructionist perspectives are concerned with giving suppressed subjects a voice in any simple way. The notion of subjectivity is itself complex. While, within a logocentric tradition, the individual is autonomous and has an essential subjectivity, identity, personality, and (if healthy) integration, this is not the case with postmodern and constructionist perspectives. In the latter, subjectivity is precarious, contradictory, and in process, constantly being reconstituted in discourses. Accordingly, the subject is multifaceted and speaks in many voices, depending on the sociocultural, historical, and interpersonal contexts in which it is situated.

It is perhaps the emphasis on language and its intimate relationship with knowledge and power which provides the most distinctive message for practice arising from postmodern and constructionist perspectives. A focus on social work as text, narrative, and artistry, as opposed to social work as science, moves center stage. Whereas science looks for explanations and causes, the story or narrative approach is intent on finding a meaningful account. As Howe (1993) has demonstrated, via his in-depth analysis of studies of what clients say about what they value from counseling and therapy, the latter is important. Talking not only helps people to understand their experiences but also allows them to control, reframe, and move on. As Howe states, “there are no objective fundamental truths in human relationships, only working truths. These decentered contingent truths help people make sense of and control the meaning of their own experience. This is how we learn to cope” (Howe, 1993: 193). Such approaches emphasize process and authorship. An open-minded engagement with people’s stories and the possibility of helping them to reauthor their lives using more helpful stories can be both an empowering and a respectful way of understanding situations and bringing about change.

I find that in listening to a variety of different vocabularies and developing a curiosity about them we not only open up a whole range of possibilities for the type of relationships we develop with the people we work with but we also recognize—as practitioners, teachers, and researchers—that we do not so much find facts as make them. If we don’t understand what someone is saying or doing, we need to ask them. In trying to educate for uncertainty and in recognizing the limits of our “knowledge,” we should thereby increase an emphasis upon compassion, carefulness, and wisdom.

I developed these ideas further with my then-colleague, Patrick O’Byrne, in our attempt to develop Constructive Social Work (Parton and O’Byrne, 2000). Drawing on a range of perspectives from postmodernism, social constructionism, and narrative approaches, our aim was to provide a theoretical framework which was usable by practitioners. This took me back to some of my earliest attractions to social constructionism but we aimed to be directly relevant to practitioners in a much more micro/clinical sense.

The term constructive social work was chosen for two reasons. First, it reflected our wish to provide an explicitly positive approach. For the core idea of construction, from the Latin to the present day, is that of building or putting together. The Oxford English Dictionary defines construction as “the action or manner of constructing,” while constructive is defined as “having a useful purpose; helpful.” Second, the term was chosen to reflect the postmodern, discourse, and social constructionist theoretical perspectives that informed it. The constructive approach emphasizes process, plurality of both knowledge and voice, possibility, and the relational quality of knowledge. It is affirmative and reflexive and focuses on dialogue, listening to and talking with the other. Social work practice is seen as a specialized version of the process by which people define themselves, participate in their social worlds, and cooperatively construct social realities. It underlines both the shared building of identity and meaning that is the basis of effective practice, and the positive results for service users that stem from the approach.

Constructive social work is concerned with the narratives of solutions to problems and with change; instead of providing the practitioner with information about the causes of problems, so that s/he can make an expert assessment and prescribe a “scientific” solution, the service user is encouraged to tell the story of the problem in a way that externalizes it, giving more control and agency and creating a new perspective on how to manage or overcome it. These narratives construct the future and anticipate change; questions encourage the service user to identify exceptions to the apparently overwhelming nature of problems—situations in which s/he has done something that made a positive difference. Constructive social work develops techniques and thinking associated with solution-focused (De Shazer, 1985, 1991, 1994; Miller, 1997), narrative therapy (White and Epston, 1990; White, 1993), possibility (O’Hanlon, 1993; O’Hanlon and Beadle, 1994; O’Hanlon and Weiner-Davis, 1989), and the strengths (Saleebey, 1997) perspectives. The approach attempts to provide questions that elicit clear goals about what the service user wants, in the user’s own words, and which involves her or him in doing something in the immediate future which can launch a new beginning. The practitioner’s mode of address is one of “curiosity and respectful puzzlement” at the service user’s unique way of making things better, rather than expertise in fitting an intervention to a need. Service users are encouraged to repeat successes, to identify solutions as theirs, and as steps to the achievement of their own goals.

Service users are invited to tell their stories using the cultural resources of their communities—local language and interpretation of the problem and the origins of their oppression and exclusion. The language of oppression, domination, subjugation, enslavement, and recruitment is used in order to try and establish how the problem is dominating the person. The service user is then encouraged to distance herself or himself from the problem and to give it an unpleasant name, using their own metaphors. It can then be externalized and politicized in terms of the forces operating against empowerment and achievement in society, in terms of style, appearance, class, gender, race, ability, family relationships, or whatever. Sometimes it is as simple as treating people with respect and referring to them by the name by which they wish to be known. The approach aims to defeat the stereotypes of the blaming official organizations, and offers service users new ways of giving an account of their situation in which their agency becomes central, and they begin to take control. This has the potential for reducing conflict between the practitioner and the service user and prepares the ground for cooperation in trying to reduce the influence of the problem and, constructing possibilities and solutions. None of this reduces accountability for mistakes, offenses, or the abuse of others, although it may challenge beliefs about more fundamental issues of self-worth and potential for change. A key aspect of the approach is thus that it encourages service users to retell their stories in terms of courageous opposition to their disadvantages and heroic resistance to their problems.

In my teaching, research, and writing, I have always attempted to introduce an “untimely” ethos to the present and thereby encourage a sense of its fragility and contingency, thus trying to demonstrate it does not “have to be like this.” In the process, we can think about the present differently and act in new and creative ways. The present is not seen as inevitable and homogeneous but as something to be deconstructed, problematized, and acted upon. The ethos is thus one of humility and a commitment to uncertainty together with a continual questioning of the present—“what is going on here?” and “does it have to be like this?” The approach adopted is not designed to establish the limits of thought and action but to locate the possible places of their transgression and how things might be done differently.

Most recently this has involved working with a large number of practitioners and first-line managers working in three children’s centers in particularly deprived localities in the northwest of England. We are trying to introduce social constructionist ideas in order to develop a constructive approach to work with children, families, and communities. In the process, we have needed to distill what we see as the key elements of such an approach, and this seems an appropriate way to conclude this chapter.

For while there is no one feature which can be said to identify a social constructionist approach, a number of themes can be seen to link them together:

1. Maria Colwell died on January 7, 1973, at the age of seven in Hove, Brighton, in the South of England. She was one of nine children born to her mother by that time. She spent over five years in local authority care, being fostered by her aunt, but was returned to her mother and stepfather (William Kepple) at the age of six years and eight months, having been placed on a supervision order to the local authority social services department from that date. The family was visited by a number of social workers over sixty times, and concerns were expressed about Maria by her schoolteacher and neighbors on numerous occasions. However, she died of “extreme violence” at the hands of her stepfather, and was found to weigh only about three-quarters of what would be normal for a girl of her age. William Kepple was convicted of Maria’s murder in April 1973, although, on appeal, the charge was reduced to manslaughter, and he was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. The decision to establish a public inquiry was taken by Sir Keith Joseph, the Secretary of State for Social Services, in May 1973, and the public inquiry took place between October 10 and December 7, 1973, with the report published in September 1974 (Secretary of State, 1974). The inquiry and the report received huge media coverage.

2. The Cleveland “affair” broke in the early summer of 1987 and focused on the activities of two pediatricians and social workers in a general hospital in Middlesbrough, a declining chemical and industrial town in the north east of England. During a period of a few weeks, 121 children were removed from their families to an emergency place of safety on the basis of what was seen by the media and the two local members of Parliament as questionable diagnoses of child sexual abuse. As a result, a number of techniques for diagnosing and identifying sexual abuse, particularly the use of the anal dilation test, the use of anatomically correct dolls, and disclosure work—were subject to close critical scrutiny. This was the first child abuse scandal in England concerned with the possible overreaction of professionals, the first involving sexual abuse, and the first where the actions of pediatricians and other doctors, as well as social workers, were put under the microscope and subjected to high-profile and prolonged media criticism. The public inquiry was established in the summer of 1987 and reported in 1988 (Parton, 1991; Secretary of State for Social Services, 1988).