Welfare & benefit systems

This highly topical book presents recent, significant research from eight nations where childcare markets are the norm.

This timely book offers a fresh look at youth participation: examining official and unofficial constructions of participation by young people in a range of socio-political domains.

Greece is a key EU entry country for unaccompanied migrant minors seeking safety but such children are frequently criminalised through detention processes. Giving voice to migrant children throughout, Papadopoulos promotes child-friendly practices and the safeguarding of fundamental rights.

Lessons from child protection errors and mistakes in 11 countries in Europe and North America are drawn together in a stimulating study from leading researchers in the field. By comparing and contrasting impacts, responses and responsibilities, it deepens understanding of how child protection systems fail and points to ideas for risk reduction.

With welfare to work programmes under intense scrutiny, this book ranges widely across Europe to review existing policies and explore future ones. It shows how many schemes do not adequately address social rights and lived experiences, and consider alternatives based on theories of non-domination.

Offers a rare and vivid insight into the everyday lives, attitudes and behaviours of the rich as well as the poor across the UK, demonstrating how those marginalised and validated by the existing welfare system make sense of the prevailing socio-political settlement and their own position within it.

This detailed study of children’s everyday practices in a small deprived neighbourhood of post-socialist Bratislava, provides a novel insight on the formation of children’s agency and the multitude of resources it comes from.

In this book, leading experts examine how early education and care is organised and funded in eight different countries. Bringing together recent evidence, the book provides rich insights on how policies work in practice, and the extent to which they help or hinder the provision of high quality education and care.

In this topical book, expert scholars from the Nordic countries, the UK and the US demonstrate how modern fatherhood is supported in Nordic countries through family and social policies, and how these shape and influence the images, roles and practices of fathers in a diversity of family settings and variations of fatherhoods.

Paving the way for a government to fulfil its responsibility to families, this authoritative and critical account of the Troubled Families Programme reveals the inconsistencies and contradictions within it, and issues of deceit and malpractice in its operation.

Anna Tarrant’s revealing research explores the dynamics and diversity of men’s caring roles in low-income households at various stages of their lives. It sheds light on men’s participation in care and the factors that affect it, including class, culture, work and the impact of austerity.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and the author’s own experience, this book explores how diverse welfare users navigate the personal and practical hurdles of Australia’s social security system.