Widening Circles of Concern for Vulnerable Children: The Emergence and Development of Social Care Work in Twentieth Century Ireland

This paper examines the relationship between social and cultural processes associated with the emergence and development of social care as a profession concerned with vulnerable children. While some functions of this nascent occupational group were previously undertaken by religious orders, the Church’s diminishing influence in the area of child protection, and the State’s acquisition of functions formerly undertaken by the family and the clergy, represent some of the social changes that preceded the consolidation of standardized ways-of-caring, and informed the development of social care practice. Widening circles of concern for children at different levels of social integration, as well as a conceptual change in which precarious childhoods are increasingly characterized in terms of vulnerability rather than moral deficiency, demonstrate shifting cultural sensitivities related to the proliferation of children’s rights. The long-term developmental approach of Norbert Elias provides a useful framework for the analysis of these social and cultural changes; specifically, the ways in which they relate to one another. Historic documents and texts are used to examine approaches to the issue of vulnerable children and their families undertaken by the State, the Church, and other less-integrated groups of actors. Shifting interdependences in this regard are significant for social care practice as they help to explain the development of cultural practices that became “problematic” in the latter half of the twentieth century, and as such were required to be undertaken by state functionaries.