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This chapter provides an overview of child labour data by discussing the historical context of data on children's work; available child labour data definitions; methodologies and sources; global estimates on children's work and some discussion on how data collection will be improved in the near future. The growth and development of statistical data collection on child labour has had many positive results, it has at last become possible to monitor accurately trends in child labour and the impact of policies and programmes to address child labour. Perhaps more importantly, the publication of accurate child labour statistics has assisted greatly in harnessing public and political support to reduce the negative consequences of children working.

Child work is a continuum, and there is no clear demarcation of when work moves from a positive experience to a harmful one. In spite of the risks posed by many forms of work, for large numbers of children, the alternative to work may be hunger or other adverse outcomes. This chapter describes the health effects of children's work and the impact of this work on the communities in which they live. The chapter is divided into three parts. First, it examines the difficulties in determining the impact of child labour on health. Second, it describes approaches which can help in understanding the impact of child labour. Third, it presents examples of the impact of child labour on the health of children, families, and communities and how these impacts might be more effectively measured.

This chapter summarizes the key findings that have emerged from an examination of a rights-oriented public health model of child labour. It considers what comprises appropriate child work and makes recommendations for further action to more effectively address child labour. It argues that simple eradication of all children's work is not currently an option. The impact of child labour on health varies and considerable research remains to be done on linking work of different intensities, at particular ages and with regard to gender and socioeconomic circumstances to different outcomes. The harm that children experience manifests itself in many guises with acute, latent, and chronic effects on the child and the wider community. Work that is identified as harmful should be addressed so that either the hazards are eliminated or sufficiently mitigated, or the work is halted. Measures taken to address harm should be undertaken with the community rather than on the community.

This chapter first discusses the relationship between education and child labour, then, the evidence for a health-benefit from school participation. It reviews the strategies used by governments and schools to attract and support working children in schools thereby, indirectly, reducing the incidence of child labour. Finally, it presents a broader theoretical overview of the problem of school participation, including non-governmental and grassroots organizing efforts on behalf of working children.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the problem of child labor and efforts to reduce and eliminate it across global, national, and local levels. It then discusses how the holistic, ecosystemic perspective of social work is well suited for analyzing and synthesizing the multifaceted, complex, interrelated aspects (i.e., determinants and consequences) of child labor. Social work needs to increase research and action into the determinants and consequences of child labor throughout the world, because it is indeed a global problem.

Focusing on debt litigation, this chapter confirms the extent to which male status was competitively gauged. Patriarchal imperatives of male provision and self-sufficient mastery were regularly invoked, demonstrating that appraisals of manhood rooted in economic independence, and heading and maintaining a household, were commonplace. However, evidence of women and children's extensive (and sometimes primary) contributions to the household economy suggests that patriarchal manhood in these terms was a privilege which many men could not afford, if not a chimera. In addition, from the late sixteenth century, increasing numbers of men and women were either excluded from householding positions or chose to adopt alternative family strategies. For these men and women patriarchal behavioural codes were irrelevant, except as the substance of social critiques levelled by their ‘betters’, suggesting the emergence of deepening fissures between concepts of manhood along class lines.

This chapter examines the symbiotic relationship between child welfare professional practice, social work in particular, and the ascent of attachment theory. The development of social work had provided fertile ground for the incubation of early ideas about attachment theory, particularly in child and family social work. It was not, however, accepted as a legitimate theory simply because John Bowlby had introduced it to the profession. Rather, while the foundations were there for attachment theory to be used in practice, it was a more complex process that eventually resulted in the theory being taught on social work courses and used routinely by practitioners. Crucial in that translation was the shift in emphasis from ‘normal’, non-clinical populations to children suffering maltreatment. As the institutional logics driving social work with children and families have shifted from the provision of help to the prediction of risk, attachment theory has been a flexible companion providing enticing vocabularies to support moral claims.

This chapter discusses how attachment theory is used, or not, in professional practice and decision making. Attachment theory is now a standard subject on social work qualifying programmes and many employers provide training for their social workers in attachment theory, ensuring that most practitioners are familiar with the theory. As the discourse of attachment theory has influenced medical opinion and doctors have the power and privilege to diagnose children, a range of ‘attachment disorders’ has been created and these disorders are used to categorise children. Afforded with greater power and status, such diagnoses by medical practitioners feed into the attachment theory knowledge base of social workers, influencing and framing how social workers think about the children and families they work with. The chapter then considers Matthew Gibson's recent study, which took place in the child and family social work service in an English local authority.

The leading discourse in the Netherlands on errors and mistakes is focused on cases that have resulted in fatal injuries. These have shocked the nation, sparked debate and inspired change. In the Netherlands, the most profound debate resulted from the death of 3-year old Savanna in 2004, the first case where an employee of the child protection agency was prosecuted for manslaughter by negligence. Over the years, the case of Savanna became an iconic part of the discourse on child protection policy, in which the term ‘Savanna-effect’ was used to refer to the shift by child care workers to risk-averse practices for fear of prosecution. Initiatives aimed at improving timely detection of children at risk, such as the reporting code of conduct (‘meldcode’) and the Reference Index for High-Risk Youngsters (‘Verwijsindex Risicojongeren’) were introduced. The discourse turned when critics claimed that the system focused too much on a fear of incidents, causing a disproportional number of children to enter out-of-home placements. This observation inspired the Youth Act 2015, which promotes the restoration and strengthening of the parents’ problem-solving abilities and responsibilities, and aims to reduce regulatory pressures on youth care professionals. This chapter reports on two studies conducted in the new child protection system: an analysis of Dutch reports on major calamities since 2015 and a media analysis of the same period. These studies indicate the current public discourse as well as the underlying problems that were identified by the Youth Care Inspection.

The issue of errors and mistakes in child protection is very rarely addressed explicitly in Italy There have been few public scandals of unprotected children or situations ‘denounced’ to the media by parents or families who felt to be victims of injustice or abusive practice. Unlike Anglophone countries, the Italian child protection system is not used to have enquiries on fatal cases nor in cases where conflicting interest arises, as divorce cases. Some reasons for this could be found in the ambiguity of the child protection system in itself (swinging from a narrow forensic child protection approach to a family support approach), or in the cultural attitude to keep hidden the recognition of errors. Following this discussion, the chapter presents an overview of existing domestic literature and research. It briefly traces the main elements of the Italian child protection system, with its changes from a paternalistic/specialised approach to a neoliberal and ‘familistic’ asset focusing on its fragmentation, ambiguity and unclear definition of responsibilities. It outlines the places where different discourses on errors and mistakes in child protection appear, (considering the public media, court proceedings and professional reflections, and how they have changed in the time. It describes the strategies adopted to deal (or to prevent) errors, drawing on results from qualitative research on how social workers deal with ‘difficult decisions’ and ethical and considering professional and institutional guidelines.

Having a good face-to-face and person-to-person connection will always be hailed as the cornerstone of child bereavement work. Although bereavement services have developed and grown rapidly over the past fifteen years, there are still a number of places where bereavement services are available in every locality. Thanks to the arrival of the telephone, e-mail services, and the Internet, there is now a new twist to the concept of early intervention in trauma support and bereavement. This chapter discusses the creative use of technology that can help shrink the space between the practitioner and the bereaved person.

This chapter examines the introduction of reform to protect children from the negative influence of the night life in American cities during the late 1800s and early 1900s. It explains that working-class children participated in both nightlife and night work. It discusses the creation of supervised recreation centers such as boys’ clubs, the regulation of child labor in the streets, and the implementation of juvenile curfews from 1880 to 1930. This chapter also describes the new institutional framework that was in place to restrict children’s access to urban night in 1930.

The introduction sets the context for the study of street vending children who work side by side with their undocumented parents in Los Angeles. This chapter outlines the various strategies the researcher used to enter the field, recruit the families, and establish rapport with the children and their parents. The author also describes the research site and the research methodology. The author is reflexive about her insider and outsider position and describes how having worked as a young girl with her parents both in Mexico and the United States helped her gain the trust of her respondents. In addition, the introduction situates the role of children and work in a historical context and provides a theoretical framework to help understand the lives of child vendors in Los Angeles. The experience of child street vendors bridges intersectionality theory, social capital theory, and the socialization of childhood and brings to light the hidden resources that are overshadowed by segmented assimilation theory, the leading theory that has been used to understand the experience of post-1965 immigrants and their children. The chapter also introduces the four overarching research questions that guide this research and provides a roadmap of the book.

The epilogue summarizes the manifestations of postcolonial paternalism towards children and a particular use of children's rights. It shows how an anti-paternalist child rights policy can contribute to overcoming this paternalism and illustrates this with the example of a local group of the African Movement of Working Children and Youth in Senegal.

This chapter discusses the development of the Coalition and Conservative Governments’ reform programme for child and family social work. Initially, the new Conservative children’s minister Tim Loughton sought to build on the work of the profession led Social Work Task Force (discussed in chapter 7), belatedly set-up under Labour after the Baby P case. This included the commissioning of the Munro Review of child protection. However, after two years Loughton was replaced as children’s minister and the Secretary of State Michael Gove initiated a new, more centrally driven, reform programme. Key policy developments included the reform of social work training, regulation and a new national ‘learning infrastructure’. Controversial plans to promote the increased outsourcing of child protection services to the private and voluntary sector were also pursued in the face of strong opposition from social work representatives.

Chapter 4 shows the children's resiliency that results from experiencing their parents’ position of oppression, which helps prevent an authority shift in favor of the children. Consequently, the children respect their parents’ work effort and report feeling closer to their parents. As a result of working together, children become keenly aware of the financial household and street vending obligations. I call this economic empathy and argue that this level of empathy is born when families develop a communal family obligation code. The chapter covers different forms of tensions between children and their parents and how children engage in family bartering with their parents. These street vending children feel torn between their responsibility to help their parents and their desire to enjoy a “normal” childhood. Overall, economic empathy can serve to buffer against dissonant acculturation.

This chapter draws on the concept of resilience in examining the effects of children's care work for individual children and young people, focusing on their emotional well being, health and welfare, personal development, aspirations and priorities for the future, as well as the effects on family relationships. It notes that there has been growing recognition that not all young carers experience negative outcomes, and some researchers suggest that a resilience perspective may help to explain individual differences in coping with adversity.

This chapter discusses young people's everyday caring responsibilities within households affected by HIV/AIDS in both the global North and South. It highlights similarities and differences between children's experiences within two divergent socioeconomic and welfare contexts. The chapter discusses the range of support that children provide for their parents/relatives, and explores gendered and temporal aspects of children's care work, drawing on young people's narratives, diaries, drawings, and photographs of their daily routines and caring responsibilities.