Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services: Explaining the ‘inverse intervention law’

Attempts to record, understand and respond to variations in child welfare and protection reporting, service patterns and outcomes are international, numerous and longstanding. Reframing such variations as an issue of inequity between children and between families opens the way to a new approach to explaining the profound difference in intervention rates between and within countries and administrative districts. Recent accounts of variation have frequently been based on the idea that there is a binary division between bias and risk (or need). Here we propose seeing supply (bias) and demand (risk) factors as two aspects of a single system, both framed, in part, by social structures. A recent finding from a study of intervention rates in England, the 'inverse intervention law', is used to illustrate the complex ways in which a range of factors interact to produce intervention rates. In turn, this analysis raises profound moral, policy, practice and research questions about current child welfare and child protection services.

Justice as Fairness in Planning Policy-Making

This paper considers a moral basis for planning theory and endeavours to establish principles of justice which might be relevant to the regulation of development. Whilst the investigation recognises that there is a need for a deeper understanding of the dynamics of governance, it suggests that many of the inefficiencies, inequities and public disquiet concerns relating to planning centre on a drift from a perception that the system is both fair and just, and that practice needs to be anchored on founding values concerned with redistribution and equality. In this context, John Rawls’ theory of justice is employed as a vehicle to capture moral ideas of equality and liberty within a constitutional democracy and as a basis for scrutinising emerging justice based issues which impact upon planning. Using National Policy Statements as a case study, the paper concludes that, whilst there are serious concerns over current policymaking practices, the principles of justice offer a foundation for practical critique which can help overcome problems of mistrust.