'For the sake of the children': Making sense of children and childhood in the context of child protection

Ideas of childhood and children are arguably at the very centre of child protection policy, theory and practice, and yet very little attention has been placed on discourses of children and childhood in this field. In this paper we begin to examine how discourses of childhood are reproduced in a child protection context by looking at the talk of practising child protection workers and supervisors in Ontario, Canada. We found that child welfare workers' talk about children suggests that two discourses about children dominate: a discourse of the child as vulnerable and in need of rescue and a discourse of the child as a rights-bearing individual. We will argue that both these discourses contribute to a symbolic extraction of the child from the family and in this way they function to distance workers from the emotional impact of their practice with parents and children. We will consider the implications of this conceptual extraction of the child from the family and make a case for a more complex understanding of children that reflects the intertwined relationship between parents and children. Lastly, a practice approach to child protection that helps workers to absorb the subjectivities of both children and their parents will be proposed.