Gender and Child Welfare in Society: Introduction to Some Key Concepts

A father beating his wife because he thinks she has been looking at another man while they were out in the pub; a girl being regularly kept off school to babysit her younger siblings; a mother who acknowledges ambivalent feelings towards her children being negatively judged by professionals because she is not all-giving and ever available; a teenage boy drinking daily because, in part, of his poor emotional literacy; a lesbian teenager suffering homophobic bullying in school and neighbourhood; a black boy struggling to achieve in school because he is surrounded by people expecting him not to. I could go on, of course, in listing reasons why the topic of gender and child welfare deserves a book. It does not only deserve a book; it deserves complex analysis, and therefore we have put together a collection of chapters on various different dimensions of the topic by authors from different locations and with different theoretical orientations.