Child protection policy and the construction of childhood

![CDATA[The way we construct or understand childhood is closely related to state policies around interventions in some families for the protection of children. Child-welfare and child-protection policies have been key discursive spaces for the way in which childhood and adult-child relations are structured. In implementing state policies child-welfare practitioners function as mediators between the state, children and their families. In this capacity professionals have been key agents for reinforcing, through their interventions with individual children, ways of defining childhood and appropriate adult-child relations within the broader society. Historically, in English-speaking societies child-welfare policy has been influenced by the developmental, adult-centric paradigm and has reinforced that paradigm through its interventions. This paradigm has constructed childhood in terms of a contrast with adulthood, as a time of 'becoming' and incompetence. Children have been conceptualized as 'lesser than' adults and fused ithin families as passive dependents. Childhood has been constructed as universal, across cultures. In recent years the emphasis on child participation, highlighted in the codification of child-participatory principles in international and national legislation, has challenged thinking about child-welfare policy and practice. This challenge is given impetus by a construction of childhood identified with an alternative paradigm. According to this alternative paradigm (James and Prout 1990) children are 'beings' who are actors in their own lives and have individual ways of experiencing the world. In this chapter this alternative paradigm is the lens through which the influence of the dominant paradigm on child-protection policy is analysed. By applying this paradigm retrospectively we can sharpen the focus of the lens on contemporary practices and thereby assist in rethinking current practice.]]