Critics of Social Workers

Did you see the programme last night about the parents whose children were wrongly taken into care. I thought it was very sad, both for the parents and for the children, but I wondered why Social Workers were being called to account for their actions when it was perfectly clear that both Social Services and the Courts acted at the time on the basis of "expert" medical opinion that stated one of the children could not have been injured any way other than deliberately.

It was the same in 1989 when in the "Cleveland Report" Lady Butler Schloss (who chaired the enquiry) clearly stated that mis-diagnosis by a Paediatrician lay at the root of the problem. She shared responsibility for the way the mis-information was put into practice equally between the Police and Social Services but all of the Media criticism was aimed at the Social workers.

The Daily Mail is particularly vehement in it's persecution of Social Workers. I was interested to hear that last nights programme was co-funded by the Mail on Sunday. I smiled ironically because I know how damning of Social Workers the headlines of those papers would have been if the doctors had been right and Social Services had left the children at home and one of them had been injured more seriously, or killed.

I am no fan of Social Services, their treatment of me when I became disabled and was no longer able to do the work they employed me to do was outrageous, and included trying to discredit work of mine they had previously complimented, in an attempt to reduce the payment I was entitled to under the circumstances of my leaving.

They did not succeed but by putting me "under investigation" they removed any possibility of me receiving support from my work colleagues who are "advised" not to contact colleagues under those circumstances, and who did not feel able to contact me even after I had left, presumably because they did not want their own records to be contaminated.

So, I am no supporter of Social Services or sloppy Social Work. As a manager I came down very hard on Social Workers whose practise was not up to scratch.

However, I am a supporter of current child protection legislation and, knowing of the stresses on individual workers who implement that law, I know the job is tough enough without workers having to balance what the media might do to them if they make a mistake.

I know of circumstances where that threat caused my managers to err on the side of caution to an extent that workers relationships with clients were compromised because those managers, who never met the families, forced my staff, through me, to take a tougher line than the case merited.

There are even poachers turned gamekeepers, ex social workers who form agencies and take extortionate amounts of public money by "reviewing" difficult cases through paperwork exercises using files (always with mistakes because overloaded workers do not have the time to maintain then properly), to almost invariably find fault with the workers because that is the way they justify their existence and ensure getting further work.

The reality of Children and Families Social Work is that one experienced worker might be holding up to 30 "at risk" cases which means responsibility for may be 50 odd "at risk" children. They work in hostile, frequently violent environments in which many are injured each year. At the time I qualified older workers were lamenting changes in child care law that forced them to involve parents in the decision making process, not because it was a bad idea, but because there is not time to do that and to keep the needs of the child "paramount" as the law requires.

Ten years after retiring from Social Work I still have nightmares about things I saw, and things children told me, while I was doing "case work".

Social Workers are an easy Media target because codes of confidentiality designed to protect the clients prevent them, or their managers, from discussing the most relevant part of concerns about the work. You will not read in the Daily or the Sunday Mail of the high number of Social Workers who are attacked and injured, (and some murdered) while carrying out the role society asks them to fulfill.

If the Media want to attack someone, they should attack a society which, through the courts and sentencing, places a higher value on stolen mobile phones than it does on Children's innocence and on Children's lives: and the lamentably small amount of money that is given to Social Services by comparison to other "front line" public services. You are unlikely to read such things in the right wing Media who want to discredit wherever possible because they do not perceive there to be a need for such services in the first place.

Bri.