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Child protection continues to be a pressing social problem. Robust and relevant research is essential in order to ensure that the scale and nature of child maltreatment are understood and that preventative and protective measures are effective. This paper reports selected results from a mapping review of research conducted in the UK and published between January 2010 and December 2014. The purpose of the review was twofold: to develop a typology of child protection research; and to use this typology to describe the features and patterns of empirical research undertaken recently in the UK in order to inform a future research agenda. The paper reports the maltreatment types, substantive topics and research designs used within empirical research published in academic journals. It identifies a number of challenges for the field including the need for conceptual clarity regarding types of abuse, greater methodological diversity and a shift of focus from response to prevention of child maltreatment. The importance of a national strategic agenda is also emphasised.

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over differences across dialogues in search of a definitive, overarching coherence. They are less inclined to identify within Plato or Aristotle a supposed origin of a monolithic 'Western' absolutism, supposedly 'continued' by an Aquinas or a Hegel, and which turns out to be more of a backward, neo-Hellenist projection than a real origin.My reservations about Bhaskar's grand historical and Occidentalizing narrative in no way impeach the real interest of his concepts of absence, negativity and non-being. I question only whether the 'totalising critique' of 'Western thought' is required to articulate them. Historical references do, of course, facilitate the exposition of a theory centred so strongly on critiques of earlier thinkers. Yet such references seem amply available within the tradition of post-Kantian modernity. Be that as it may, Alan Norrie is to be applauded for an account as faithful as possible to Bhaskar's writings. Dialectic and Difference displays precision and depth. It will certainly aid anyone seeking greater insight into Bhaskar, and achieves clarity on points that Bhaskar himself exposes with some difficulty. The book introduces ideas that can certainly hold their own in current debates about social theory. Whatever problems may lie within the theory's exposition, Norrie has rendered a service to scholars wishing to examine critical realism through a focused and probing study.