“How many people in your country support smacking?” keynote speaker Michael Freeman asked us at last week's International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN) conference in Hong Kong.

Even more interesting than the answer was the sample. “Did you include children when you thought about people’s attitudes?” he went on to inquire. I’m ashamed to say that I did not.

Children were, apparently, human becom-ings not be-ings, he added.

Quite a number of speakers shook up my assumptions and, when they settled again, subtle reconfigurations emerged.

For example, I was among those who took it for granted that the vulnerability of children decreased as they grew up. But James Garbarino usefully pointed out how mid-childhood could be a particularly risky time. Older children would no longer be comforted by the protective strategies of care-givers – telling all those stories to mask the cruelty of the world – but nor were they yet expert at protecting themselves.

Genetic differences really did play a role, according to many. Richard Krugman went too far for me when he extrapolated findings about genetically-impaired, neglectful mother mice to human beings; but the insight of those who spoke about how brain development predisposed responses to trauma and even differed for girls and boys was highly illuminating. Perhaps it’s time that we social scientists (and for an anthropologist like me this is difficult) grappled with the taboo of biology.
 
In terms of practice, I was intrigued by the stories of failure from Europe and the US: parenting classes and home visits which benefited large numbers of children hardly at all, the fragmentation of services and lack of co-ordination between providers (for example, those working on domestic violence versus child protection), the over-emphasis on prosecuting adults rather than supporting children.

But equally I was struck by the strength of practice, media work and advocacy in the Global South. Not all practice in resource-poor countries – which ISPCAN still strangely calls ‘developing’ countries, as if ‘we’ in the North have reached our developmental destination – is effective. But the presentations by South-based experts gave a sense of much integrated, proportionate, child-centered and intelligently-focused work.

Whether it was Egypt’s success in banning all corporal punishment, or Kenya’s use of media, or South Africa reflecting on comparative experiences of institutional care and fostering, we saw glimpses of unheralded heroes. This echoes the experience of ChildHope.
  
The Global South was not well-represented – numerically in terms of delegates, keynote speakers or presentations – but things may soon change.

The movement for the recognition of the value of practice in the South is growing inside and outside ISPCAN. If experts in the South were involved in organizing the next conference they would probably inject ideas for more interaction and debate, as tends to be the norm across civil society in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Opportunities for discussion at this conference were rare. Despite assertions about the need for holistic, integrated and disciplinary approaches by many speakers, the chance to forge new joined-up thinking through dialogue was not a feature. My prediction is that the 18th, in Hawaii in 2010, will attain a more elevated level if assistance is sought from the Global South.