Regulating late modern childrearing in Ireland

Abstract

Child Welfare agencies across the developed world have experienced an past twenty years or so. Almost all these changes have occurred under the heading of "Child Protection", a quite distinctive and identifiable way of doing child welfare work which comes complete with a n ideology of childhood, a set of professional procedures and practices based on beliefs about a phenomenon entitled "child abuse" and a new social work vocabulary embedded in a discourse which is only very rarely questioned.