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Building on the findings from the national study of mothers in recurrent care proceedings in England, this paper proposes that the concepts of complex trauma and epistemic trust may help explain parents' difficulties in engaging with child protection services. With the aim of advancing theoretical knowledge, qualitative data drawn from interviews with 72 women who have experienced repeat care proceedings are revisited, with a focus on women's developmental histories and accounts of engagement with professionals, to probe the issue of service engagement. The article starts with a succinct review of the literature on parental non-engagement in child protection, highlighting strengths and potential limitations of current knowledge. This is followed by an introduction to the theoretical concepts of complex trauma and epistemic trust, outlining how these concepts provide an alternative framing of the reasons why parents may resist, or are reluctant to engage with, professionals. Drawing on women's first-person accounts, we argue that high levels of maltreatment and adversity in women's own childhoods shape adult relationships, particularly in relation to vulnerability to harm in adult lives but also mistrust of professional help. Extracts from women's first-person accounts, chosen for their typicality against the core themes derived from the data, indicate that acts of resistance or rejection of professional help can be seen as adaptive—given women's childhoods and relationship histories. The authors conclude that parents' social histories need to be afforded far closer attention in child protection practice, if preventative services are to reach those with histories of developmental trauma.

This paper problematizes the ways in which the policy process is conceived in published psychological research. It argues that these conceptions of the policy process fail to ade- quately reflect the real-world dynamism and complexity of the processes and practices of social policy-making and implementation. In this context, psychological evidence needs to be seen as one type of evidence (amongst many others). In turn this requires researchers to take account of broader political processes that favour certain types of knowledge and disparage others. Rather than be regarded as objective and scientific, policy in this characterisation is regarded as a motivated form of politics. This multi-layered, multi-level hybrid structure is not immediately amenable to the well-intentioned interventions of psychologists. While the tendency of many psychologists is to overestimate the impact that we can have upon policy formation and implementation, there are examples where psychological theory and research has fed directly into UK policy developments in recent years. This paper draws on the recent Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative and the work of personality researcher Adam Perkins on the UK's social security system to ask whether psychology has a sufficiently elaborated sense of its own evidence base to legitimately seek to influence key national areas of public policy. The article cautions against dramatic changes to policy pre- dicated upon any one reading of the variegated and, at times, contradictory psychological evidence base. It concludes that, in order to meaningfully contribute to the policy develop- ment process in a way which increases equality and social justice, psychologists need to be more strategic in thinking about how their research is likely to be represented and mis- represented in any particular context. Finally some possible directions for psychologists to take for a more meaningful relationship with policy are suggested.