Redrawing the line: An exploration of how lay people construct child neglect

Abstract

While there has been an increasing professional and political focus on the prevalence and harmfulness of child neglect, little has been done to explore what child neglect means outside child protection circles. This qualitative study explores lay constructions of child neglect by thematically analyzing focus group discussions between 46 self-defined 'lay' people in England. Participants viewed neglect as extremely damaging for children and as arising when children's physical, emotional, training and supervisory needs were unmet due to abnormal parental behavior. Children with unmet needs were positioned as deprived, unloved, uncontrolled and escaping. They were only positioned as neglected when failure to meet their needs was attributable to a lack of parental knowledge and skill (clueless parents), a lack of appropriate parental disposition (underinvested parents) or both (unsuitable parents). 'Normal' parents - those with the appropriate parental disposition, skills and knowledge - who failed to meet their children's needs were not seen as neglectful but rather as overburdened. As 'normal parenting' has fragmented in late modernity, society wide consensus on child neglect was felt by participants to have retreated to child protection definitions, alienating lay understandings. If child neglect really is 'everybody's business', then it is important that lay people are included in forging new definitions of and responses to meeting the needs of children.

Neighbourhood collective efficacy and protective effects on child maltreatment: A systematic literature review

“…Warner (2014) reported that in neighbourhoods where there are high hopes in formal agents, ISC control in the form of indirect intervention would be successful because it provides legal backing to neighbours' intervention efforts. Congruent with previous study findings, participants’ resistance to intervene in maltreatment within their own neighbourhoods may be attributed to the fear of retaliation or the fear that the children may experience worse forms of violence (Bensley et al., 2004; Williams, 2017).…”

“…However, it is possible that residents had little faith in formal agents in their neighbourhoods compared to unfamiliar neighbourhoods. Existing evidence suggest a low reporting rate of maltreatment cases among non‐mandatory reporters (such as neighbours and friends), due to the fear of having children removed from birth parents (Walsh & Jones, 2016; William, 2017) or having little faith in formal child protection organisations (Sawrikar, 2019). Warner (2014) reported that in neighbourhoods where there are high hopes in formal agents, ISC control in the form of indirect intervention would be successful because it provides legal backing to neighbours' intervention efforts.…”

“…Such programs should be built on the logic of the transactional collective efficacy model (Figure 1) by creating avenues for parental engagement to enhance social cohesion and influence ISC. That said, cultural nuances should be carefully considered in developing collective communities because social cohesion has been reported to inhibit the exercise of ISC within ethnic minority communities, due to the fear of family breakdown and social stigma (Sawrikar, 2019) or retaliation (Williams, 2017; Wolf et al., 2018). These cultural inhibitors should be considered in promoting collective efficacy practices or programs.…”

Conceptualisation of child neglect: A Ghanaian practice narrative

“…The findings revealed that both Practitioners and parents identified poverty as a major cause of neglect. The argument indicates that efforts to minimise situations of child neglect in Ghana should focus on poverty alleviation, since poverty is interconnected with child neglect (William, 2017). Yet while the Practitioners focused on the consequences of unemployment on parents’ inability to care for their children, parents on the other hand chose to blame each other for the poverty situations of the family.…”

“…Essentially, occurrence of these predisposing factors results in families shirking their responsibilities towards their children. Evidence from literature identified poverty and lack of social support as key predisposing factors for child neglect (Jutte et al, 2014; William, 2017).…”