When it comes to child protection, who is showing social workers exactly what they should be doing? In this book, Harry Ferguson guides you through the day-to-day realities of child protection practice, outlining its deep complexities along with the knowledge, skills, values and organizational supports necessary to do this difficult job.

Protecting Children in Time provides a highly original analysis of the origins and development of the taken-for-granted notion that it is possible through social intervention to protect children from avoidable harm and even death, to protect children in time . By using case-studies which span the past 120 years of 'modern' practices and drawing on the work of leading social theorists of modernity and risk society it provides a new way of thinking about constructions of child abuse as a social problem and child protection as a late-modern expert system and experience. It proposes new ways of...