If you pay for quality you only cry once: The paradox of prevention in modernized social services

One of the crucial dilemmas that practitioners face in child protection work and managing vulnerable adults is balancing effectiveness with a commitment to social justice. Such dilemmas reveal a series of underlying ‘policy to practice’ paradoxes associated with the modernization process.

At the heart of this debate is the concept of prevention. Prevention may be conceptualized as a response to some of the contradictions of modernity. It is predicated on certain core assumptions of the current social order concerned with the prediction, assessment/ diagnosis and treatment of social problems.

However, as the social order is subject to change, some of its foundational pillars become destabilized and fragmented by social processes deeply embedded in the modernization process. In this sense modernization may contain the seeds of its own destruction. Prevention may also be seen as a way modernized social services manage threat and in social work it is bound up with the management of risk.In the post Baby Peter era in the UK and problems of protection orientated practice in other European welfare states, calls for prevention from policy makers have grown ever louder. However, translating such pleas into everyday practice has so far proved to be problematic.

In this exploratory article some of the core theoretical ideas underpinning the ‘paradox of prevention’ debate are explored in the context of modernized services. The ideas of different writers and research evidence from the international literature will be used, including the classic work of Lydia Rapoport and Michael Lipsky published some 50 and 30 years ago respectively. It is argued that such work has resonance for unraveling many contemporary paradoxes and practice dilemmas associated with prevention.

The lecture is part of the YTI open lecture series. 

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Marjukka Virkajärvi
marjukka.virkajarvi@uta.fi