Over 30 years ago, the United Nations developed the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), heralding the importance of protecting children from a range of human rights violations. Among these are the right to be free from abuse and neglect at the hands of parents or other caregivers, and the responsibility of states to devise a protective response. How nations conceptualize harm and even how they define childhood varies markedly across the globe. This Handbook describes and analyzes the ways in which 50 countries from every continent, except Antarctica, have devised measures for child protection emphasized in the UNCRC. The Handbook discusses the legislative responses, public administrative systems, and the social service networks that governments have put in place to secure the protection of children against maltreatment and exploitation. Synthesizing data from across the world, the authors suggest a global typology of child protection systems for understanding the diversity of service responses. The typology consists of five ideal types that have as their emphasis protection against an array of risks to childhood and that represent the focal point for government intervention in the lives of families. They include child exploitation protective systems, child deprivation protective systems, child maltreatment protective systems, child well-being protective systems, and child rights protective systems. The Handbook is a valuable resource for researchers, students, and policymakers attempting to craft thoughtful state responses to children's needs
Jill Duerr Berrick serves as the Zellerbach Family Foundation Professor in the School of Social Welfare at U.C. Berkeley. Berrick's research focuses on the relationship of the state to vulnerable families, particularly those touched by the child welfare system. She has written or co-written 11 books on topics relating to family poverty, child maltreatment, and child welfare services and has written extensively for academic journals. Berrick's research approach typically relies upon the voices of service system consumers to identify the impacts of social problems and social service solutions in family life. Her newest book, The Impossible Imperative: Navigating the Competing Principles of Child Protection examines child welfare professionals and the morally contentious and intellectually demanding choices they regularly face in their work with children and families.
Neil Gilbert is Chernin Professor of Social Welfare at U.C. Berkeley. He has served as a Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development and a Visiting Scholar at the International Social Security Association in Geneva. Gilbert was awarded two Senior Fulbright Research Fellowships to study European Social Policy at the London School of Economics, the National Institute of Social Work and the University of Stockholm. He has served as a visiting Professor at McGill University and Hamburg University.
His publications include thirty-two books and over 130 articles that have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Public Interest, Society, Commentary, and leading academic journals. Several of his books were translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Italian and widely reviewed in venues such as the
New York Times, the
New York Review of Books,
The New Republic, the
Wall Street Journal, and the
Atlantic. Gilbert is chairman of the Board of Seneca Family of Agencies and a recipient of the University of Pittsburgh Bicentennial Medallion of Distinction.
Marit Skivenes is a professor in political science at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the director of Centre for Research on Discretion and Paternalism.
Prof. Skivenes has published numerous research articles in the field of child protection and children´s rights, with a focus is on the legitimacy of state interventions and the quality of decisions made in the best interest of the child. She has been the Principal Investigator for large international research projects, and been co-editor on several cross-country books on child protection.
