Social Workers and Child Protection

[jobotic]

Obviously the responsibility for this horrendous brutality lies with those who committed it, but the fact that the danger that Arthur Labinjo-Hughes was in was missed is also awful

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/dec/04/arthur-labinjo-hughes-abuse-cases-being-missed-due-to-funding-cuts

I just dread to think what culture wars bullshit will come from this. Johnson saying that he will leave no stone unturned, but I bet funding cuts and austerity will left under a rock and some bullshit about SWs being too "woke" will be the narrative of the day.

Don't read the details of the case if you haven't already.

[Retinend]

The cases of Victoria Climbié, Peter Connelly (Baby P) and now Arthur Labinjo-Hughes mark 20 years of these repeated scandals and calls for improvements. It's shocking that child protection services are so unable to intervene when there are existing concerns. @holyzombiejesus has recently written about the stress of working in these environments, and I'd like to know what he thinks about how these sorts of red flags go unheeded, if not unnoticed.

[mothman]

There must presumably be numerous success stories of timely interventions preventing all sorts of horrors (or one would hope do, anyway). Or are all these just hand-waved away as unwanted meddling from "woke civil servants" by the "never did me any harm" crowd?

[kngen]

My partner worked in CPS in London 10 years ago, in massively underfunded departments with high staff turnover and  managers absent for months signed off with stress (quite reasonably). She had to work with impossibly high caseloads and constantly battled with magistrates (i.e. tory shopkeepers and bank managers, who insisted on keeping families together no matter what) and the police, who couldn't give less of a fuck about anything they were called on to do, regardless of the obvious signs of abuse/neglect right in front of their noses.

I can't imagine how hard it must be now, given the even more brutal cutbacks and trying to do your job during the pandemic.

But yeah, the social workers will be vilified by the red-tops. Same as it ever was.

[bgmnts]

I worked in social services this year for a couple of months and yeah it's very underfunded and you realise very quickly there are lots and lots of people who should not be allowed to have children.

[JaDanketies]

We had a bad experience with social services.

We spoke with plenty of professionals before our son was born. This involved telling one of them about mental health issues and substance use, which probably put a red flag next to our name.

Anyway the kid was born and he had a little mark on his head, a 'cherry birthmark'. The health visitor came round and quizzed us a bit. We were living in my dead dad's house, which at the time was owned by his fiancee, so she probably assumed we were poor. I told her I was self-employed, and she probably assumed I was doing something illegitimate.

She then implied that we might have smashed this two-week-old baby in the head ourselves, and told us to go to the GP to get the mark looked at. I booked in at the GP and got an appointment the next day.

That night I drank two cans of Old Speckled Hen.

At about 2pm the following day I took our son to the GP. He told us to take him to the hospital, where they confirmed that it was a birthmark. They also shone a light in his eyes to make sure we weren't beating him up and that he didn't have burst capillaries in his eyeballs.

Then the next day I get a phone call from social services. They tell me that they're investigating the 'unexplained bruises' that my son has got. They tell me that the doctor had told them I "smelled of alcohol" when I took him to the GP, and that we have a history of mental health problems and drug abuse. I believe I would've become a little defensive at this point, told them it was a birthmark, and asked them wtf they were talking about saying I smelled like alcohol.

I tried to get records of the doctor's notes from the GP but I couldn't see anything about be 'smelling of alcohol'. Eventually, anyway, the social services accepted that it was a birthmark.

This whole thing made me realise the following:

• You can't talk to your doctor about drugs or alcohol when you have a young child. They share your information with 'primary care teams' which includes your health visitor, who then passes it to social services.
• Social services and the health visitor probably stereotyped us and then viewed all of our behaviour through this stereotype
• Social services are apparently willing to lie so they can make you sound like a bad parent, i.e. saying that I smelled of alcohol
• I also suspect that we got such a close eye put on us, while Baby P's parents got relatively ignored, because we're some nice people, and it's easier to turn the screws on nice people. Bad and abusive parents are probably the kind of 'clients' many social workers want to be done with as quickly as possible. Nice parents who might be doing one or two things wrong, maybe, are probably the kind of people social services and health visitors like working with. It's like in school, a teacher would prefer to spend time helping a polite kid grasp a difficult concept than help an impolite kid who is struggling at everything.

I assume that they would not have immediately gone to stealing our baby. I guess they were intending to force us to take part in some drug and alcohol abuse classes, under the threat of stealing our baby if we didn't. It was still deeply unpleasant. If we have another baby we're probably going to forgo the health visitor and skip straight to social services' involvement. Cut out the middleman and tell social services to examine us and then leave us alone at the earliest opportunity.

Anyway this poor kid's story was awful. Social services apparently said it was a happy family whenever they went around, although the kid must've been underweight. It strikes me that the parents were behaving like callous and calculating psychopaths, and I'm not sure if it's possible for any social worker to overcome the calculated behaviour of a team of psychos.

[Retinend]

I'm so sorry you had to go through all that, @JaDanketies . It goes to show that just being globally "more vigilant" isn't a solution either - that way you incentivize social workers to report anything and everything, and clogging up the pipeline. Moreover, being intimidating and uncooperative you're less lightly to be investigated - which is second nature for the kind of parent who would abuse their child.

[jobotic]

One of the more unusual (and in a way disturbing) aspects here is that they didn't seem to treat the other children in the household like they did Arthur. That must be rare and make deciding whether or not children are in danger all the more difficult.

I dunno, don't want to read anymore about it.

[Kankurette]

I wonder how many of the same people screaming about social services letting Arthur down, on Mumsnet and Facebook and so on, are the same people who insist that a slap didn't do them harm as kids, or tell anyone who expresses concern about possible child abuse to mind their own business. "I would have taken him in." Would you fuck. And they'll keep voting Tory, with more and more cuts to social services, and there will be more cases like this. And it doesn't help that there are people like JaDanketies who get mistaken for abusers when they aren't. But what do we do if we think a child is being abused?

I can't read about the case. It's too disturbing. It was on the news when I was in the gym yesterday and I had to look away in the end.

[jobotic]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/03/the-death-of-arthur-labinjo-hughes-raises-difficult-questions-we-must-address-them-all

[Sebastian Cobb]

The Arthur thing seems genuinely horrific.

Another recent one was that story of a young woman who left her kid to starve while she went out and celebrated her birthday. It whipped up a tabloid frenzy about her being massively neglectful. But if you scratch the surface it seems she was a very young parent from an abusive family background and multiple safeguarding failures happened along the way that lead to the tragedy.

[Catalogue of ills]

My partner worked in CPS in London 10 years ago, in massively underfunded departments with high staff turnover and  managers absent for months signed off with stress (quite reasonably). She had to work with impossibly high caseloads and constantly battled with magistrates (i.e. tory shopkeepers and bank managers, who insisted on keeping families together no matter what) and the police, who couldn't give less of a fuck about anything they were called on to do, regardless of the obvious signs of abuse/neglect right in front of their noses.

I can't imagine how hard it must be now, given the even more brutal cutbacks and trying to do your job during the pandemic.

But yeah, the social workers will be vilified by the red-tops. Same as it ever was.

Regarding the judges, that isn't quite right. It's family court judges who make the decision whether to grant a care order, not regular magistrates, and it's the Children Act that stipulates that where possible children should be with their birth parents, so the legal bar for obtaining a care order is high. The onus is on the local authority to make the case for removing a child from birth parents if not doing so would leave the child at risk of significant harm, and it does need to be a solid case. The rest of your post is spot on though.

[Johnny Foreigner]

It's a case of sadism; these people clearly derived pleasure from torturing the boy. Had he lived, in all likelihood, he would have developed strong urges to kill his tormenters. It's more common than people want to believe; children are being tortured this very moment. Which begs the question: is it responsible to let anyone randomly have children in the first place, without satisfying any formal criterion beforehand?

[Catalogue of ills]

There must presumably be numerous success stories of timely interventions preventing all sorts of horrors (or one would hope do, anyway). Or are all these just hand-waved away as unwanted meddling from "woke civil servants" by the "never did me any harm" crowd?

Plenty of positive interventions from social workers. A lot of the harm that children are exposed to isn't the result of the sort of calculated cruelty that this poor boy endured, but the result of some people being absolutely clueless. You'd like to think that some people didn't need it pointing out to them that leaving your cocaine where your 3 year old can get it is wrong, or that constantly fighting and abusing each other in front of your kids is harmful, but some do. With some intervention and support, a lot of harmful situations are improved.

[Retinend]

. Which begs the question: is it responsible to let anyone randomly have children in the first place, without satisfying any formal criterion beforehand?

Sounds like a kneejerk reaction. It's irresponsible for the government not to administer parenting licenses?

[mothman]

Plenty of positive interventions from social workers. A lot of the harm that children are exposed to isn't the result of the sort of calculated cruelty that this poor boy endured, but the result of some people being absolutely clueless. You'd like to think that some people didn't need it pointing out to them that leaving your cocaine where your 3 year old can get it is wrong, or that constantly fighting and abusing each other in front of your kids is harmful, but some do. With some intervention and support, a lot of harmful situations are improved.

Yes, and it's a shame those positive success stories don't get the traction that the failures do, and that the adverse cases where it's down to parental cluelessness (and all parents are clueless) don't appeal to the press as much as the cases where the parents are genuinely evil. Like this one.

[The Culture Bunker]

An ex of mine worked for some years as a SW for children's services in Manchester, before she got so burned out by the workloads and shit management that she quit. I'd say the city was somewhat notorious in SW circles for being a nightmare to work for - I remember her coming home in tears from having to attend a meeting to justify putting a child in care. Management basically accused her of being too soft and not examining other options (ie placing child with elderly grandmother) and thus costing the council thousands of pounds unnecessarily. I can only imagine in the ten years since, numerous cuts to funding have made this even more an issue.

[Johnny Foreigner]

Sounds like a kneejerk reaction. It's irresponsible for the government not to administer parenting licenses?

I have to say yes. There is a task for government if ever there was any. A psychological assessment for prospective parents would be a good idea. I genuinely believe that; no irony.

[Retinend]

You're obliged to punish those who don't comply, then.

[Porky]

The cases of Victoria Climbié, Peter Connelly (Baby P) and now Arthur Labinjo-Hughes mark 20 years of these repeated scandals and calls for improvements. It's shocking that child protection services are so unable to intervene when there are existing concerns. @holyzombiejesus has recently written about the stress of working in these environments, and I'd like to know what he thinks about how these sorts of red flags go unheeded, if not unnoticed.

These scandals go back more than 50 years, I have forgotten the names but there were some back in the late 1960s/early 1970s which ended with "lessons will be learned" but the same failings continuing to happen. One name that seems to ring a bell was a 6 years old girl named Maria Coldwell I think who was murdered by her stepfather circa 1972. An earlier circa 1969/1970 was a single mother and her partner killing their infant child.

[Johnny Foreigner]

You're obliged to punish those who don't comply, then.

Yes, fiscally.

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

eugenics are good, actually

[Johnny Foreigner]

I apologise for the offence of not wanting sadists to have children.

[bgmnts]

Sounds like a kneejerk reaction. It's irresponsible for the government not to administer parenting licenses?

I mean child abuse is very common. I dont see what is kneejerk about this idea.

[JaDanketies]

Can't see any way of administering parenting licenses that wouldn't be a totalitarian dictatorship.

[Twit 2]

The notion of parenting licences is hilariously naive. Morally, it's dubious as fuck, but on a pragmatic level alone it's cuckoo land. Sometimes I'm genuinely astonished by people's batshit viewpoints on here.

[bgmnts]

Yeah sadly there is no solution to this, lots of people are scum, the majority of people are generally just arseholes and have the capacity to be very amoral. To deny people the right to spawn is just stupid and yeah a bit rum.

There are always going to be children being abused, there will always be extreme stories like this to hit news circulation and then we can all talk about it like divs who think we have a clue about anything. The cosmic ballet goes on.

[Twit 2]

People will act according to their environment, the particular circumstances and pressures they're under. You can't change people directly but you can change the conditions in which they find themselves. A properly funded welfare state and decent living conditions would go a long way to helping this. Obvious as fuck and yet, tragically, more and more of a fantasy, as we collectively slide into a hell of our own making. Alright cheers.

[chveik]

Yeah sadly there is no solution to this, lots of people are scum, the majority of people are generally just arseholes and have the capacity to be very amoral. To deny people the right to spawn is just stupid and yeah a bit rum.

There are always going to be children being abused, there will always be extreme stories like this to hit news circulation and then we can all talk about it like divs who think we have a clue about anything. The cosmic ballet goes on.

"Depressed to the point of poisonous toxicity."

[Kankurette]

I apologise for the offence of not wanting sadists to have children.

What makes you think 1) the government wouldn't horribly abuse the policy and 2) potential abusers would be honest about it? They're hardly going to say 'why yes, I do enjoy hurting children'. How many abusers lie and get away with it?