For decades, child protection systems have striven to provide responsive services to vulnerable children and families in the face of the constant change and instability caused by the bureaucratization of child protection. This book lends a strident voice to the argument for a shift beyond the current risk paradigm, towards genuine cultural change.

The state is increasingly experienced as both intrusive and neglectful, particularly by those living in poverty, leading to loss of trust and widespread feelings of alienation and disconnection. Against this tense background, this innovative book argues that child protection policies and practices have become part of the problem, rather than ensuring children’s well-being and safety. Building on the ideas in the best-selling Re-imagining child protection and drawing together a wide range of social theorists and disciplines, the book: • Challenges existing notions of child protection, revealing their limits; • Ensures that the harms children and families experience are explored in a way that acknowledges the social and economic contexts in which they live; • Explains how the protective capacities within families and communities can be mobilised and practices of co-production adopted; • Places ethics and human rights at the centre of everyday conversations and practices.

Modern society is increasingly preoccupied with fears for the future and the idea of preventing 'the worst'. The result is a focus on attempting to calculate the probabilities of adverse events occurring – in other words, on measuring risk. Since the 1990s, the idea of risk has come to dominate policy and practice in mental health across the USA, Australasia and Europe. In this timely new text, a group of international experts examines the ways in which the narrow focus on specific kinds of risk, such as violence towards others, perpetuates the social disadvantages experienced by mental health service users whilst, at the same time, ignoring the vast array of risks experienced by the service users themselves. Benefitting from the authors' extensive practice experience, the book considers how the dominance of the risk paradigm generates dilemmas for mental health organizations, as well as within leadership and direct practice roles, and offers practical resolutions to these dilemmas that both satisfy professional ethics and improve the experience of the service user. Combining examination of key theories and concepts with insights from front line practice, this latest addition to Palgrave's Beyond the Risk Paradigm series provides an important new dimension to debates on mental health provision.

This book brings critical, scholarly attention to the systematic positioning and subjective experiences of mothers involved in child protection processes in “ risk” -based child protection systems (Parton, Thorpe and Wattam; Connolley; Swift and Callahan). While mothers are typically the primary focus of child protection prevention and investigations (Azzopardi et al.; Fallon et al.; Swift and Callahan), their gendered experiences, challenges and triumphs are seldom given space in the academic literature, practice and/or public spaces to be seen or heard. Chapters in this volume build on existing literature to illustrate the structural positioning and/or lived experiences of mothers who come into contact with child protection for a variety of reasons: substance (ab)use, positive HIV status, child injury, fetal alcohol syndrome, colonial assessment methodologies, young age, incarceration, childbirth, and intimate partner violence. This book offers three unique contributions to existing literature on mothering in child protection. First, it creates space for mothers involved in child protection to have their voices heard. Second, it acknowledges the centrality of mothers' subjective experience in keeping children safe. Finally, it challenges dominant, often dehumanizing narratives of mothers in involved in child protection through providing a more nuanced understanding of their lives. Ultimately this anthology calls for a fundamental rethinking of how mothers involved in child protection proceedings are conceptualized in child protection research, policy and practice. It is recommended that mothers voices must be central to humanely reforming child protection systems.

The risk assessment process, the interventions and treatment commenced as a result of it and the theory behind it are central to the administration of criminal justice programmes around the world. Most youth and adult corrections departments routinely conduct risk assessments, which are then used to inform the nature and intensity of subsequent criminal justice interventions. In this unique and important text, a team of the world's leading researchers in the field of criminal justice come together to provide a critique of this risk paradigm, and to provide practical guidance for professionals, students and academics on how to move to a more effective way of working with offenders. Divided into three sections, the book provides coverage of topics such as: - The development of risk assessment in criminal justice practice, and its advantages and disadvantages. - The significance of risk factor research in understanding and explaining juvenile delinquency – as well as the problems it creates. - The argument that the risk paradigm fails to accommodate diversity, further disadvantaging women, ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups. - The various ways in which real or imagined risk posed by offenders has been regulated under the risk paradigm, the powerful influence of media reporting, and ways of moving 'beyond risk' to support successful reintegration of offenders. - Ways forward for criminal justice interventions that do not rely on risk, but focus rather on the vitally important aspects of social context, relationships and motivation. With strong links between theory and practice, Beyond the Risk Paradigm in Criminal Justice provides a fresh new direction for criminal justice work.

"cross the spectrum of political ideologies there is, in principle, widespread agreement that the state has a legitimate role in protecting children from harm. Even the Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman (1962), among the most ardent liberal supporters of the laissez faire philosophy, recognized this "paternalistic" function of government. At the same time, the traditional view of children, that they are the property of the father (pater) or the parents, is under pressure (Zelizer, 1994; James & Prout, 1997; Archard 2004). Societies are at an intersection when it comes to how children are treated and how their rights are respected, which creates tensions in the traditional relationship between the family and the state. Children are a focus of government responsibility under certain state-defined norms relating to harm and need. And parents are sometimes constrained by the state from exercising their (familial or property) rights under state-defined criteria of harm and need"--

This volume provides readers around the globe with a focused and comprehensive examination of how to prevent and respond to child maltreatment using evidence-informed public health approaches and programs that meet the needs of vulnerable children, and struggling families and communities. It outlines the system failures of contemporary forensically-driven child protection practice. Detailed guidance is provided about how to re-think earlier intervention strategies, and establish stronger and more effective programs and services that prevent maltreatment at the population level. Service user and stakeholder perspectives, particularly from marginalized groups including Indigenous peoples, highlight how public health approaches can better support families and keep children safe. Case studies from different countries grapple with the fraught nature of large system change and the various strategies needed to effect multi-level reforms. Presenting the reader with an array of innovative services used in different institutional and community context, this volume confronts the complex challenges found in implementing successful prevention programs that are aligned with diverse cultural and political environments and community expectations.