Special Issue “Contemporary Developments in Child Protection”

The following Special Issue will be published in Social Sciences
(http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci, ISSN 2076-0760),
and is now open to receive submissions of full research papers and
comprehensive review articles for peer-review and possible publication:

Special Issue: Contemporary Developments in Child Protection
Website: http://www.mdpi.com/si/socsci/child_protection/
Guest Editor: Professor Nigel Parton
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2014

Summary

The last forty years has witnessed increasing public, political and
media concern about the problem of child maltreatment and what
to do about it. This is now evident in most jurisdictions and is
receiving serious attention from many international and trans-national
organisations. While the (re)discovery of the problem in the USA in
the 1960s was particularly associated with the ‘battered baby
syndrome’ this has now broadened to include: physical abuse,
sexual abuse, neglect, emotional abuse, abuse on the internet, child
trafficking, sexual exploitation, and to effect all children and young
people and not just young babies. Similarly the focus of attention has
broadened from intra-familial abuse to abuse in a whole variety of
settings including schools, day care, the church and the wider
community. There has also been a broadening of concern from not
simply protecting children and young people from serious harm but
to also prevent the impairment of their health and development and
to ensure that they are able to grow up in circumstances which are
consistent with the provision of safe and effective care so that all
children can achieve the best outcomes.

In the process the laws, policies, practices and systems which have
been developed to try to identify and prevent child maltreatment
have become much more wide-ranging and complex and have
themselves been subject to continual criticism and review. Social
workers, health and education workers, the police and other criminal
justice workers as well as members of the wider community are all
seen to have key roles to play in both protecting children and young
people and assessing and monitoring actual and potential perpetrators.

While these issues have been subject to often heated and high profile
media and political debate they have not received sustained analytic
and research based attention in the social sciences. The issue of child
protection is often seen as somewhat marginal to a whole range of
social science disciplines.  The purpose of this Special Issue is to try
and act as something of a corrective to this. It encourages the
submission of papers from a wide range of disciplines including law,
sociology, politics, criminology, psychology, anthropology, education,
social work, social policy and gender studies as well as contributions
which are cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary.

Keywords

*  Child abuse
*  Child protection
*  Child maltreatment
*  Public protection
*  The role of state, family and community
*  Family support
*  Social surveillance
*  Risk to children

You may send your manuscript now or up until the deadline.
Submitted papers should not have been published previously,
nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. We also
encourage authors to send us their tentative title and short
abstract to the Editorial Office (socsci@mdpi.com) for approval.

This Special Issue will be fully open access. Open access (unlimited
and free access by readers) increases publicity and promotes more
frequent citations, as indicated by several studies. Open access is
supported by the authors and their institutes.
More information is available at http://www.mdpi.com/about/openaccess/.

The Article Processing Charges (APC) will be waived for well prepared
manuscripts. However, a fee of 250 CHF may apply for those articles
that need major editing and formatting and/or English editing.
For details see: http://www.mdpi.com/about/apc/.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors before submitting a manuscript:
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci/instructions/.
Manuscripts should be submitted through the online manuscript submission
and editorial system at http://www.mdpi.com/user/manuscripts/upload/.

Social Sciences (ISSN 2076-0760) is an international, peer-reviewed,
quick-refereeing open access journal (free for readers), which publishes
works from extensive fields including anthropology, economics, law,
linguistics, education, geography, history, political science, psychology,
sociology and so on. Social Sciences is published by MDPI online quarterly.

MDPI publishes several peer-reviewed, open access journals listed at
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In case of questions, please contact the Editorial Office at:
socsci@mdpi.com.