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This chapter positions within long histories of child protection, childhood, and family. Situating this book as a history of modern Britain, it also discusses how the voluntary organisations studied relate to broader historiographical examinations of voluntary action and public participation in the post-war period. This introduction also explores the theoretical underpinning of this book in terms of thinking around expertise, experience, and emotion; complex and shifting constructs which have nonetheless become significant—and visible—in late twentieth-century Britain.

‘The Battered Child Syndrome’ explores the re-emergence of public and political concerns about child protection in the post-war period, and the role of medical communities in constructing this. It assesses the work of paediatric radiologists in Britain and America, who worked in the 1940s and 1950s to use x-ray technology to ‘make visible’ the healing injuries of children. In England, the NSPCC drew on this work to conduct early studies about the ‘battered child syndrome’. The chapter demonstrates that much of this work examined children and parents as objects of study. Nonetheless, early concerns about the emotions of children and parents were present, and this foreshadowed the development of experiential movements traced by the rest of this book.

‘Hearing Children’s Experiences’ explores emergent concerns about understanding, accessing, and utilising children’s experiences and emotions to reshape child protection policy and practice. These concerns were foregrounded in the 1960s and 1970s, but developed significantly from the 1980s, fostered by a coalition of small children’s charities, psychologists, agony aunts, and popular authors. The chapter traces how constructs of childhood experience were used to further pre-existing adult agendas but also to make genuine efforts to enable specific groups of children to criticise existing statutory interventions. By contrasting the thinking about emotion and experience in two landmark public inquiries—around the death of Maria Colwell in 1973 and the Cleveland case of 1987—the chapter traces increased public policy interest in consulting with children over these decades.

‘Inculcating Child Expertise’ explores how small children’s charities sought to enter family homes and schools to make children themselves expert in child protection, providing education about bodily autonomy, self-expression, and confidence in the 1980s. In doing so, these charities reshaped and challenged relationships between parents and teachers and between adults and children, and presented a model whereby children both were, and had the potential to become, authoritative. The chapter explores the material and consumer products which became important in this moment—storybooks and films—and analyses how these objects looked to reflect, but also to reshape, complex visions of childhood experience, emotion, and expertise. Overall, this chapter argues that the 1980s was a distinctly liberationist moment for children, whereby child protection campaigners bypassed the moral politics of the ‘sex wars’.

This chapter explores how groups of parents formed collective action groups, of various forms, looking to contest child protection policy and practice in the late twentieth century. Such activism first emerged in the late 1960s, initially in the form of peer support groups for parents who had harmed, or felt at risk of harming, their children. In the 1980s, multiple groups developed to support parents who had been falsely accused of abuse. These spaces of activism complicated visions of family life and also made public the emotional toil of interacting with statutory agencies around child protection. As such, and for the first time, parents acted collectively to critique professional intervention, constructing a visible, public, and powerful notion of experiential and familial expertise. Parents also demanded that social workers, lawyers, and clinicians themselves discussed their own experiences and emotions, looking to blur the lines between the personal and the professional.

‘Mothers, Media, and Individualism’ focuses on the role of television and newspapers in constructing concerns about child protection in the late twentieth century, particularly through focus on the experiences and emotions of mothers. The chapter demonstrates that media interest in mothers has often portrayed women as hysterical, and has focused particularly on women’s campaigning against paedophilia. Nonetheless, the chapter also traces cases in which women themselves exerted control over media representations, harnessing journalistic interest to direct attention to their own agendas or cases. Looking to the late 1990s, and to the New Labour moment, the chapter further demonstrates that parental campaigning has become more embedded in public policy over the late twentieth century, shifting from disorganised protest to calculated collective action, whereby mothers held influential individual positions in Tony Blair’s ‘sofa government’.

This chapter explores a variety of spaces in which people who had been abused in childhood—survivors—began to speak publicly about their experiences from the 1970s, 1980s, and in particular from the 1990s. It analyses survivor testimony in agony aunt columns, memoirs, academic study, and through newly formed campaign groups. In doing so, the chapter assesses why and how public policy interest in survivors developed decades after focus on children and parents, alongside broader interest in tracing trauma through the life course. Survivor representatives developed significant positions of influence in public policy and media in the last decade of the twentieth century, though nonetheless voluntary groups also struggled to gain government funding, and often felt that their inclusion in political processes was tokenistic. This chapter again traces a growing public policy focus on individual community representatives in the New Labour years, and it demonstrates how voluntary leaders drew on professional, experiential, and emotional expertise.

The conclusion discusses the key findings of this book. It argues that understandings of child protection have developed rapidly over the late twentieth century. This process has not only been driven by media, public policy, and research, as previous analyses have emphasised, but also by children, concerned parents, and survivors. These groups have acted in conflict and collaboration with media, social policy, and medicine, challenging long-standing professionals to display and perform experiential and emotional expertise. The conclusion traces the extent to which this forging of experience and emotion as expert, and the place of the voluntary sector in this process, has historical precedents, and argues that these phenomena were distinct to, and are revealing of, the specific contexts of Britain in the post-1960s moment. The conclusion finally explores the contemporary relevance of this work, notably in terms of making visible the politicisation of child protection and the fragility of child protection concerns.