The case of the missing perpetrator

This book analyses the introduction, development and
reification of the concepts of children witnessing
and mothers failing to protect as powerful and
currently dominant child welfare ideas in the United
Kingdom and Canada. Discourse analysis methods from
a number of sources were drawn on to reveal and
interpret how and why the discourse of failure to
protect has emerged, how it shapes and informs child
protection practice and policy, and the effects on
both mothers and social workers.

Strega demonstrates that the concepts of children
witnessing and mothers failing to protect are
constructed, enacted and deployed in ways that
maintain and perhaps even increase the nature and
extent of violence against women and children. She
contends that the rhetoric and actions engendered by
these discourses are in themselves injurious to
women, both individually in cases where mothers lose
or are threatened with the loss of their children,
and collectively in contributing to a continuing
failure to hold responsible or even notice men who
perpetrate violence against mothers.