The role that area deprivation, family poverty, and austerity policies play in the demand for and supply of children's services has been a contested issue in England in recent years. These relationships have begun to be explored through the concept of inequalities in child welfare, in parallel to the established fields of inequalities in education and health. This article focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and out‐of‐home care and child protection interventions. The work scales up a pilot study in the West Midlands to an all‐England sample, representative of English regions and different levels of deprivation at a local authority (LA) level. The analysis evidences a strong relationship between deprivation and intervention rates and large inequalities between ethnic categories. There is further evidence of the inverse intervention law (Bywaters et al., 2015): For any given level of neighbourhood deprivation, higher rates of child welfare interventions are found in LAs that are less deprived overall. These patterns are taking place in the context of cuts in spending on English children's services between 2010–2011 and 2014–2015 that have been greatest in more deprived LAs. Implications for policy and practice to reduce such inequalities are suggested.

In the UK and internationally, reducing inequalities in health and education has become accepted across the political spectrum as an essential component of government policy

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to argue for the need to move away from a sole focus on assessing and dealing with individualised risk factors in order to more fully engage with and understand the social determinants of many of the harms that are manifest in families. Design/methodology/approach: It draws from a number of research studies being conducted by the authors and a literature on psycho-social approaches to social suffering. Findings: It highlights the evidence on the contribution of poverty and inequality to many of the problems encountered within families. It explores how hurt, shame and loss are experienced by those who are marginalised and struggling to live well and care safely for themselves and others. Practical implications: It highlights the practice implications of adopting an approach that engages with both the social and the psychological and understands their inter-relationship. It offers some thoughts on how the social in psycho-social might receive the attention it deserves, a situation which does not pertain currently. Originality/value: It offers an original contribution to thinking in the area of child protection where the focus is primarily on individualised risk factors. It highlights the importance of understanding the social determinants of many of the harms experienced in families and offers some pointers towards thinking and practising differently.

This article explores a mixed methods study, set in two sites in England and one in Scotland, that aimed to understand what constitutes domestic violence and abuse (DVA) in child protection and the relationship with intersecting inequalities. The findings reveal a fragile knowledge base that is impeding the understandings required to comprehend and respond to DVA in differing communities. The lack of contextual information on the socio-economic circumstances of families is a particular gap in light of the finding that, by combining data sets in two of the sites, researchers found a social gradient in operation. This challenges a common framing of DVA as unrelated to poverty and highlights the importance of further research into the links. The international scholarship on intersectionality appears poorly understood. This was reflected in the lack of official data gathered on how pathways for children are impacted by intersecting inequalities. With important exceptions, evidence-based typologies of risk were not used, contributing to ‘one size fits all’ responses to those impacted. The research discusses whether a project constituting individual casework and multi-agency working can carry the weight of expectations being placed upon it by a societal problem such as DVA.