Families: Their Role as Architects of Civil Society and Social Inclusion

The achievement of social inclusion with children and young people who come before statutory services requires support of families in the face of dominant professional, legal and administrative practices and procedures that often reflect a range of institutional biases in decision making and resource allocation processes. At the same time it requires reaching into families to give protection when that is needed. This perspective is developed from experience in the United States and is applied in this paper to issues of child protection.