Child Protection and the Conception of Parental Responsibility

The legal discourse on child protection that is characterized by the normalization‐moralization paradigm focuses more on society's response to parental failure than on the predicament of the child. Findings from texts of legal discourse in Israel and in Holland portray an alliance between the respective legal systems and an epistemology of normality with regard to parenting that thereby turns normality into normalization. Both sets of texts are guided by an ontology of moral judgment that protects societal morale rather than the child. Morality is turned into moralization. To focus on the protection of the child, the article proposes a paradigm wherein the definition of morality is derived from concern for the other and relies on constructs that represent the evolving transaction between parent and child.