This book brings critical, scholarly attention to the systematic positioning and subjective experiences of mothers involved in child protection processes in “risk”-based child protection systems (Parton, Thorpe and Wattam; Connolley; Swift and Callahan). While mothers are typically the primary focus of child protection prevention and investigations (Azzopardi et al.; Fallon et al.; Swift and Callahan), their gendered experiences, challenges and triumphs are seldom given space in the academic literature, practice and/or public spaces to be seen or heard. Chapters in this volume build on existing literature to illustrate the structural positioning and/or lived experiences of mothers who come into contact with child protection for a variety of reasons: substance (ab)use, positive HIV status, child injury, fetal alcohol syndrome, colonial assessment methodologies, young age, incarceration, childbirth, and intimate partner violence. This book offers three unique contributions to existing literature on mothering in child protection. First, it creates space for mothers involved in child protection to have their voices heard. Second, it acknowledges the centrality of mothers’ subjective experience in keeping children safe. Finally, it challenges dominant, often dehumanizing narratives of mothers in involved in child protection through providing a more nuanced understanding of their lives. Ultimately this anthology calls for a fundamental rethinking of how mothers involved in child protection proceedings are conceptualized in child protection research, policy and practice. It is recommended that mothers voices must be central to humanely reforming child protection systems.

Brooke is an Instructor and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Sociology at Brock University in Ontario, Canada and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Early Childhood Studies, Education, Sociology and Child and Youth departments at several universities in southwestern Ontario. Her research and scholarly work focus on the privatization of childcare in Canada, political representations of the childcare policy “problem”, reconceptualizing and reasserting care in early childhood education, and re-imagining child protection systems through an ethics of care perspective.

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