The case of the missing perpetrator

This book analyses the introduction, development and reification of the concepts of children witnessing and mothers failing to protect as powerful and currently dominant child welfare ideas in the United Kingdom and Canada. Discourse analysis methods from a number of sources were drawn on to reveal and interpret how and why the discourse of failure to protect has emerged, how it shapes and informs child protection practice and policy, and the effects on both mothers and social workers. Strega demonstrates that the concepts of children witnessing and mothers failing to protect are constructed, enacted and deployed in ways that maintain and perhaps even increase the nature and extent of violence against women and children. She contends that the rhetoric and actions engendered by these discourses are in themselves injurious to women, both individually in cases where mothers lose or are threatened with the loss of their children, and collectively in contributing to a continuing failure to hold responsible or even notice men who perpetrate violence against mothers.