Predictably covered by the Guardian: the awful, unregulated internets are now to blame for hurting the feelings of social workers.
As well as the obligatory NSPCC advert, this article is accompanied by a picture of Renee Zellweger playing a social worker rescuing a child in the film Case 39. A picture of Angelina Jolie in the (largely factual) film Changeling, playing a mother incarcerated in an asylum by authorities for daring to suggest that she could identify her own child, was perhaps unavailable.
But I digress. This article has the familiar stamp of the statist eugenicist, happily demonising anyone who displays justifiable emotion when the security of healthy, loving families is threatened. (Heidi unpicks this woolly thinking through the application of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Gill posted it here. It's well worth a read.)
Back to the piece:
The hounding of social workers by the press for being "baby-snatchers" if they take children into care is a predictable story.
I just don't accept that. Yes, people expect that children are removed from unequovically dangerous situations. And yes, people are angry when children are removed from loving families. Those two responses are predictable surely?
But now such persecution has taken a new twist with online campaigns by families protesting about child protection intervention.
Persecution? Campaigns? Like describing loving parents as "lobbyists" this is DCSF propaganda speak at its worst.
Nobody is protesting about intervention that protects children from actual harm. People - not just parents - are protesting about unwarranted, preemptive, disproportional intervention that seeks to prevent even the slightest, theoretical possibility of harm, including that of the nebulous, subjective and unproven from being inflicted upon other people's children. Those people are protesting about knee-jerk responses to protect, say, the professional reputations of directors of children's services, rather than children who have been abused.
A proliferation of blogs and pages on social networking sites have sprung up. In one example, a Suffolk family claim they were forced to give up their child for adoption, with no evidence of abuse. They went to Spain before the birth of their second child, who is now in the care of Spanish foster carers acting on information from Suffolk social workers.
No direct refutation of the claims made by the Suffolk family, then.
In some cases, the blogs make for uncomfortable reading.
Indeed they do. The situations that some families find themselves in are heartbreaking. But I don't think that this is what the Guardian means. No:
Social workers and managers are named and vilified,
Vilification. Someone has been reading up on DCSF propaganda speak again.
Where social workers and managers have acted unprofessionally or inappropriately, naming them, describing their behaviour and cataloguing their actions is absolutely necessary. They do not deserve impunity. We pay for their services and, much like a buyer on ebay, we have every right to pass comment on how they operate and the quality (or otherwise) of their provision. In fact, it is all the more important that we do so, because unlike the ebay buyer we have no choice about whether or not we want to buy what is on offer, or whether or not we want the unelected social workers and managers in post to provide it.
accusations are hurled at councils,
More emotive language. "Hurled accusations" or accurate and deeply unpleasant assertions?
and court injunctions banning the identification of the families and children are flouted.
Imagine the scenario. Your children have been ripped from your family for no good reason and placed with abusive foster carers, or worse, adopted. What do you do? Obey a court injunction because it's a court injunction? Or do the right thing and speak out?
According to Hilton Dawson, chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers, websites devoted to attacking social workers are a growing problem.
More emotive language! These websites are only a problem (and a minor one at that) if social workers are doing a job that people want them to do - and they are doing it properly. But social workers can't do their jobs properly if they are expected to achieve the impossible. The responsibility that social workers accept and the powers they are given over other people's lives can never sit comfortably in the balance with the capacity for human error, not to mention a general decline in critical reasoning skills, so well displayed by the journalist in this article.
"They illustrate the difficulties of the social workers who are damned when they do and damned when they don't," he says. "We get many complaints from people who feel very threatened by the publication of sometimes vitriolic criticism of them, and really very unpleasant personal abuse."
This damned if you do and damned if you don't argument really has to be picked apart one and for all. Social workers should not damned for failing to keep all children safe at all times. We all know that's impossible.
Social workers are probably damned when they fail to act on a mountain of referrals to save a child who even the stand-in milkman knew was being abused. And social workers are always damned if they remove even one safe child from the protection of his or her loving family. That's biology. To reduce that kind of situation to being about "threatened social workers", "vitriolic criticism" and "really very unpleasant personal abuse" is offensive.
Managers are almost powerless to stop what Simon White, director of children's services in Suffolk, describes as "floods of information about the council that is completely false and misleading".
Some of the blogs are hosted in the US, where the constitution's first amendment, guaranteeing the right to free speech, makes them all but untouchable.
This is absolutely not my area of expertise but a quick search seems to imply that, if there was anything substantial about Simon's concerns, then Suffolk County Council's legal department would be more than willing to push forward with an action under the
1996 Defamation Act.
White's concerns about the content range from the impact on the targeted social workers and the reputation of the council to the effect the content of the sites may have on the cases and the families involved. "There's quite a lot of abusive and personal stuff aimed at named individuals," he says. "Some is clearly defamatory, and obviously we have duties to those staff. And when you get into the wilder edges of it, you are sometimes worried about their personal safety."
If the council and its employees do a sterling job then the vast majority of people will either ignore these websites, or, inflamed by the passion and loyalty aroused by the clear-sighted leadership of Simon White and his corporate director colleagues, they will jump into the fray to defend their cherished council. They will request - no insist - that their taxes continue to be extracted from them in order than they can continue to be provided with value for money service provision and, of course, that staff will be provided with police protection from the "wilder edges" of the blogosphere.
White also fears that an online campaign might be contagious.
"Contagious" campaigns? Really? If I saw someone mug an old lady, my first impulse would not be to mug the old lady myself.
Is it possible that an increasingly risk averse children's service is starting to remove more children "just in case"? Is it possible that more families than ever before face a brick wall when trying to ascertain information from councils who just use the FOI Act as a shield against scrutiny? Is is possible that more normal people than ever before are turning to the internet as a way of comunicating freely with each other, forging links and sharing information in a way that threatens the very fabric of this system's control?
Perhaps:
"If it started to become commonplace that whenever we did a pre-birth conference, families would consider leaving the country, it would force a change in practice," he says. "We'd have to be much less open with families."
Those in charge of the failing services we are compelled to fund, whether we want them or not, will become even more overt in their tactics. Yet more information will be withheld and the threat of child removal will be used as a supremely effective tool to force compliance.
One Suffolk employee who has been named on a blog says the experience is not just personally upsetting but has a knock-on effect on other cases. "Other families are aware of what's being said and they will bring it up, and that's difficult, especially when people may be making sensitive decisions," the employee says.
This Suffolk employee is saying that now he has been named, it is harder for him to intervene in families who are now aware of his practice of removing children from other families who do not want their children to be removed.
There are no guarantees. But is someone who publicly says "I do not want Social Services to remove my children from me" and openly shares intensely private and personal information about their family situation more likely to be a loving, or abusive, parent?
The problem of online hate campaigns is not limited to Suffolk. White knows of at least three other councils that have been similarly targeted, and a quick trawl of the internet reveals links to families around the country keen to tell their stories. Myths about social services – that they get financial rewards for every adopted child, or that they are involved in conspiracies to remove families' children – are perpetuated.
This gives me far more cause for concern about the conduct of statutory children's services than if a single person from Suffolk was ranting and raving on a personal blog.
If the conduct of ALL statutory children's services is not 100% exemplary at all times then it is ordinary people, not councils, who are being harmed.
Regardless of internal targets or KPIs, all social services departments are financially "rewarded" with taxpayers' money for the removal and adoption of children. Fact.
Unprofessional practice happens in local authorities up and down the country. Fact.
"The vast majority of what we do is actually allowing families to stay with their kids, even when we've got very serious concerns," White says.
What needs to be unpicked is whether the "serious concerns" of social workers are reasonable. I have been in a meeting with social workers who described breastfeeding past the age of 6 months as "abusive".
"There were 38 adoptions in Suffolk last year. Of children who entered the care system, 45% went back to their parents in the same period."
The figures are irrelevant. If you remove safe and secure children from innocent, loving families, then you are personally responsible for committing a wicked act. Every single time you do this, then you are a child abuser.
White does not think there is much that can be done about the way information spreads, but he would like action beyond the individual local authority when allegations about conspiracies or financial inducements are made.
Simon White would still allow people to blog and perhaps even email each other, but only if they avoid saying things he doesn't like. We've dealt with the issue of financial inducement - you pay your taxes and children are removed. Is Simon White prepared to go on record and confirm that no professional has ever conspired to have a child removed?
"The profession, or the government, needs to respond," he says. "They need to defend the arrangements and processes, and put right mistakes and misapprehensions."
Why don't "they" do something? Won't "they" stand up for beleaguered Suffolk children's services?
The BASW works constantly to address the myths about social work, Dawson says. He has recently written to every local authority in the country offering to help them communicate to communities and the local media what social workers do.
It is not a myth that human beings make mistakes. It is reality. And when social workers make mistakes, they have to be prepared to take responsibility for their actions. Social services departments do not exist without the real, human people who create and fill them. Every single one of those people has agreed to be paid with money taken from people who have little control over its direct allocaiton. Every single one of them has made a choice to assume and exercise rights over other human beings. In which case, they had better be very careful indeed.
At a time when councils are struggling to recruit social workers,
There is a reason for this: the job has grown and mutated into something that any rational person would question.
another reminder of the pressures of the job is the last thing they need.
Or precisely what they need to make an informed choice.
"This work is immensely demanding, personally and professionally, and it's difficult to retain staff at the front end," the Suffolk employee says.
Of course it is. When the incentives of a secure, supposedly rewarding and relatively well paid job are outweighed by frustration, stress and misery - then staff turnover reflects it.
"Staff are concerned that the same sort of thing could happen to them."
And indeed it could, if they make a mistake.
So what do you do? Do you continue to lure more people into an impossible profession and firefight with positive PR campaigns run by Hilton or this man each time one of them makes a mistake? Do you complain that your organisation - vast, influential, and supremely protected, with unrivalled power over vulnerable people's lives - is being bullied by a handful of individuals with Wordpress accounts?
In line with this government whose officers have so readily demonstrated similarly evasive techniques, it would appear so.
(The database of local authority staff who have to do with electively home educating families can be accessed and added to here.)
