Relating to children in time: Locating the voice and experience of babies and older children in child protection work since 1880 - Professor Harry Ferguson

In this webinar, Harry draws on his research into the history and sociology of child protection work going back to its beginnings as a 'modern' practice in the 1880s. This shows how the complexities and struggles to gain access to children at risk and work with them and their parents in their homes have been present from the start. In the late-1890s, early 1900s the NSPCC ran Children's Shelters where they took children and encouraged them to, what today we would call, 'disclose' their lived experience. Harry traces the emergence of a therapeutic orientation to working with children and families across the 20th century. This will show for example that a key space for child-centred and more therapeutic practice from the 1950s was the motor car.

This webinar will arrive at the present day through consideration of Harry's ethnographic research which observed encounters between social workers and children and families and some of the key learning about relationship-based practice from his new book Making Child Protection Work.