The Analogy of Child Protection as Public Health: An Analysis of Utility, Fit, Awareness, and Need

Public health approaches to child protection operate by way of analogy. They attempt to import knowledge from the field of public health into the field of child protection by implying equivalences between the fields. This article draws on Kellert’s (2008) criteria for evaluating metaphors in scientific reasoning: utility, fit, awareness, and need. It argues that the analogy can be useful but demonstrates poor fit because it relies on false equivalences between maltreatment and health conditions, child protection clients and health consumers, and child protection and health-care systems. Insufficient overt awareness of these false equivalences has resulted in the analogy becoming overstretched and used in support of erroneous conclusions. Knowledge imported from public health is not needed to advance policy and research in child protection. This goal is best served by approaches endemic to child protection that do not rely on the false equivalences that underpin this analogy.