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Alison Cleland, CHILD ABUSE, CHILD PROTECTION AND THE LAW Edinburgh: W Green (www.wgreen.co.uk), 2008. vii + 475 pp. ISBN 9780414016071. £45.

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Pages359-360
DOI10.3366/E1364980909001644
Date01 May 2009
AuthorFiona Raitt
Published date01 May 2009

This book is overdue and very welcome. It provides the first systematic review of the law relating to child abuse and child protection in Scotland. Considering how much of the national resource is devoted to the issue, it is astonishing that the subject has been so neglected by publishers and academics. In addition to the criminal nature of child abuse, the crushing effect of the trauma associated with abuse presents a major social problem, often long into adulthood. Alison Cleland's treatment of the subject makes substantial amends for past neglect, with a text that offers depth of coverage and critical comment, as well as a useful research-mapping of the wealth of policy and interdisciplinary material cited. The book will have clear appeal for lawyers working in the Children's Hearings system, family law and criminal law, as well as a wide range of professional practitioners in health, social work and education who have daily involvement with child protection concerns.

Cleland sets her discussion in the context of children's rights, touching on the debates surrounding the new sociology of the child and the presumptions of privacy still encasing the family. Perhaps inevitably though, these more theoretical perspectives are forced into second place by the sheer volume of detail than needs to be considered in any discussion of child protection procedures. One of the valuable features of this book is its chronological account of the policy backdrop to the phenomenon of child abuse – sexual abuse in particular – and the massive, arguably unwieldy, infrastructure required for an effective child protection regime in the modern world. The book opens with a detailed discussion of the legal recognition and identification of forms of abuse. Chapter 2 introduces the current statutory framework for child protection, which, as explained in chapter 3, creates considerable privacy difficulties in terms of data protection, confidentiality and the disclosure of records. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 deal at length with the substantive crimes against children, including internet pornography, trafficking and prostitution; the consequences of...

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