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Edited by Barry Goldson, Michael Lavalette and Jim McKechnie.
Sage Publications
£55 (hardback)
ISBN 0761972323
£17.99 (paperback)
ISBN 0761972331

Some books are route maps and others aerial photographs. This falls into the latter category and is aimed at undergraduates looking at childhood and youth studies. The authors have brought together a number of academics to scrutinise children - and indeed childhood - from sociological, psychological and historical perspectives.

It is not therefore a book to navigate around, say, Sure Start, performance indicators for children's services or the possible contents of the proposed green paper on children at risk. Rather, the reader discovers more on the New Right agenda for children or what is described as New Labour's "neo-liberal policies".

As well as looking at the construction of childhood, there are chapters on poverty, children and education (and the inequalities of the present school system), children who work and crime and childhood. A chapter on child abuse and child protection provides a helpful historical view, beginning with neglect and, by way of physical and sexual abuse, looking at some of the work developed by Barnardo's on children abused through prostitution.

There is plenty of scope to get a bird's eye view of the terrain before reaching for the map.

Chris Hanvey is UK director of operations, Barnardo's.