Secure Accommodation in Child Care

Some children seem to present parents, teachers, social workers and courts with such serious or disparate problems that holding them in secure accommodation is apparently the only way to control them. How this comes about, and by what criteria social workers and courts help them make these difficult decisions, are the subjects of this intriguing and innovative book. In "Secure Accommodation in Child Care", Harris and Timms use a major empirical study of children in secure accommodation as a basis for an analysis of relations between the state, the family and the "difficult" child. By synthesizing literary and social science theories, they examine court procedures and the experiences of social workers and the children themselves to explain how professionals and children make sense of their respective worlds, and how that "sense" is translated into personal or professional action. The functions of secure accommodation, although legally ascribed, are fundamentally ambigous; to "lock-up" children by means of an authorized strategy which embraces both the "sick" and the "wicked" suggests the existence of a less than obvious relation between meeting "needs", and furthering "interests".

Robert Harris is Professor of Social Work in the University of Hull, Noel Timms, recently retired, is Emeritus Professor of the University of Leicester.