Child Welfare in the Twenty-First Century

Child welfare as a field of inquiry and practice spans an immense range of activities involving different actors in family life and in professional involvement with families and children. In their classic paper, Hardiker, Exton and Barker (1991) provide a useful template for mapping and analysing child welfare activities within a social policy context. This model remains pertinent today, as it enables policy makers, practitioners and researchers to consider where they can most effectively intervene in the continuum from universally provided preventative services to targeted specialist services for children in state care and extremely vulnerable families. To a certain extent, the model has provided a basis for a commonly found split in many national child welfare services into family support and child protection. It also provides a useful backdrop to this Special Issue, as the papers included can be mapped across this spectrum.

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