Manufacturing 'Bad Mothers': A Critical Perspective on Child Neglect

Manufacturing "Bad Mothers": A Critical Perspective on Child NeglectKaren J. Swift Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995; 218 pp.Reviewed by Wendy J. Atkin Department of History Carleton University Ottawa, OntarioIn this important new study of the place of child neglect in Canadian social work, Karen Swift shows how the state must "manufacture" a bad mother before it can defend a neglected child. Swift opens three windows on this subject: a feminist historical framework on the social welfare system, a deconstructive analysis of the knowledge and power base of the social work profession, and an experiential view of the field. At the heart of this book is the basic contradiction that a system constructed historically to "save" children, as was the original goal of the so - called child - savers of the late nineteenth century middle - class social reform movement in urban Canada, has failed. Swift asks why, when "the supposed beneficiaries of child welfare resources and efforts are children, frequently children do not benefit and in fact often suffer in spite of or directly as a result of child welfare interventions into their families" (p. 12). Feminist historians such as Sally Alexander have demonstrated how motherhood presents contradictions for women. At historical junctures when the feminist movement ebbed, the child protection impulses of social reformers and the state have increased the regulation of mothers. In social work, the category of child neglect appears not to be gendered, but Swift points out that "virtually all people actually accused of neglecting their children, both historically and at present, are mothers" (p. 101). The professional social worker is also gendered and the moral approbation of the nineteenth century friendly visitors has been replaced with the scientific apparatus of child development and psychological theories born by young, white, middle - class female case workers.Swift, attempting to answer her basic, painful question of why her chosen profession, built around the premise that neglected children deserve remedy, has proven so incapable of helping them, bravely steps outside the social work paradigm. By uniting the positivist stream of research on child neglect and the social deconstructive techniques of the post - modernist scholar, Swift shows that child neglect cannot be understood if seen only in the light of "observable phenomenon" (p. 16). It is a large undertaking, perhaps best distilled in the illustration from Michel Foucault's analogy of a military camp, which "could also be read as a description of the modern child welfare bureaucracy: '[The camp] was a way to render visible those who are inside it . to transform individuals . to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to alter them'" (p. 26). Through "labelling" and "knowing" people, their reality can be "changed. " Swift invokes the infamous Home Alone case (named for the Hollywood movie) that hit the media in 1992 after a middle - class couple left their children home alone while vacationing in Mexico. In fact, Swift argues, poor children live in families where abandonment is a "normal" living strategy: "The experience of being left alone is not necessarily less frightening to poor children, but simply less interesting to the public. Abandonment of poor children is not news" (p. 7). When the judicial and child welfare bureaucracies took over the case, the couple received an extensive list of charges, they ultimately relinquished their children, and it came out that the parents had "deviant" psychological profiles. The neglect was thus "known" as a pathological incident and faded from public view. …