Child Protection and Social Inequality

Dear Colleagues,

There is longstanding and widespread evidence of profound differences in reported levels, experiences and outcomes of child abuse and neglect, between countries, between areas within countries, and between subgroups of children and parents. Such differences have been related to poverty and social class, race and ethnicity, child and parental disability and poor health, gender, age and sexual orientation, as well as to law, policy and practice. The sharpest examples, perhaps, concern the experiences and treatment of indigenous peoples. It is unclear whether child protection systems and services merely reflect wider social inequalities, can be effective in reducing or compensating for social inequalities or may exacerbate inequalities in children’s and parents’ lives. However, the characterization of these differences as inequalities that are systematically associated with structural social dis/advantage and are unjust and avoidable (Bywaters et al., 2015) is relatively recent. Currently, an inequalities perspective is very underdeveloped in child protection research and discourse by comparison with the focus on inequalities in health and in education.

This Special Issue of Social Sciences aims to promote the theoretical, methodological and empirical development of such an inequalities perspective. We welcome submissions from authors with a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds in order to establish new thinking and new evidence about child protection inequalities internationally.

Bywaters, P., Brady, G., Sparks, T., Bos, E., Bunting, L., Daniel, B., Featherstone, B., Morris, K. and Scourfield, J. (2015). Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services: Explaining the “inverse intervention law.” Children and Youth Services Review, 57. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2015.07.017

Prof. Dr. Paul Bywaters
Prof. Dr. Brid Featherstone
Prof. Dr. Kate Morris
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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