Abstract
This chapter from Participation in Child Protection: Theorizing Children’s Perspectives identifies and critically analyses the dominant discourses that form the ideological conditions of children’s participation in child protection interventions. The central argument made in this chapter is that the dominant capitalist discourses of individualism and welfare-based paternalism work together to impede rather than enable children’s autonomy. It further argues that there is a fundamental conflict between children’s rights to participation and protection within statutory child protection interventions which provides justification for the widespread denial of children’s participatory rights despite a political ideology that supports the freedom of the individual in the interests of human flourishing.