Suchergebnisse

Re-issued with a new preface and concluding reflections and recommendations, this book provides an informed understanding of the Cleveland child abuse crisis of 1987 and draws links with current issues in child protection, such as historical and organised abuse.

Despite heightened media attention and the increase in professional knowledge about child abuse, many children are still being failed by the system. Using attachment theory as a foundation, this book addresses in depth the acute practice dilemmas concerning children who, despite the climate of increased awareness, multi-disciplinary cooperation and legislative and procedural change, cannot easily be protected. Illustrated throughout with case material and informed by the experiences of survivors themselves, the book presents a framework for well managed and resourced, flexible and integrated i

The article reviews ethical consideration in social research and identifies current approaches to safeguarding ethical standards. One of these is the requirement to obtain approval from research ethics committees (RECs). Based on the results of a survey of UK social science academics about the process of applying to National Health Service RECs, we conclude that lessons can be learned for Sociology from the experiences of social researchers in Health. Overly rigid ethics committees could be counter-productive; we may need to reassess the functions of RECs and to strengthen other procedures to ensure the highest ethical standards for Sociology. Some suggestions for how this might be done are taken from the literature in the hope that they will stimulate debate.

It seems plausible to argue that scarce resources such as social security payments should be targeted to those most in need, and that income should play a large role in defining need. Even though some aspects of targeting, such as whether to have tapered means tests or not, are obviously political in nature, it may appear that at least the identification of 'those most in need' in terms of income is largely a technical exercise. The argument of this article is that even the measurement of income is only partly a technical exercise.1 It is also a highly problematic and political one that will always lead to understandable resentment on the part of the 'nearly poor', that is, those who are excluded by policy decisions regarding components of the scale by which income is assessed. We illustrate this with an example of a hypothetical family payment where those who are classified as 'poor' and 'nearly poor' on one income‐scale are classified otherwise on a plausible alternative scale. It does not follow that targeting of payments on the basis of income should be abandoned. But it does suggest that all targeting should be recognised for the blunt political instrument that it is, and that its status as a precise technical tool for achieving greater efficiency be regarded with less confidence than is currently fashionable.

One of the reasons why poverty lines became popular at the turn of the century was their promise of a scientific technique that would dispense with moralising about poverty. We argue that a price paid in this quest has been an impoverishment of the richness of the notion of 'a decent life', the moral concept underlying poverty. In addition, poverty lines have in practice been more to do with inequality at the bottom end of the income distribution than with poverty. The purpose of this article is to rehabilitate the measurement of poverty, and to make it credible. We set out our preferred method of poverty measurement, and illustrate it using data from the Australian Standard of Living Study. A feature of our approach is to distinguish clearly between issues of inequality and issues of poverty. Questions such as who is on the bottom of the income distribution, whether this has changed over time, and how income levels of the worst off compare with the mean, are questions of inequality. As such, the answers tell us nothing at all about how the worst off are actually living. To answer that question, we require direct measures of consumption and of social participation. These measures are not as simple, but they provide us with knowledge about poverty that poverty lines have promised, but have not delivered in a credible fashion.