For anyone other than a parent (or legal guardian) of a child, wanting only to protect them from harm is not feasible - or possible.

It is not in the NSPCC's interests for abuse to stop. Full stop. Does an organisation ever desire to cease to exist?

Would Diana Sutton really want to give up her generous salary, pension and other benefits, not to mention the power and kudos that accompanies each "for the sake of the children" sentence that falls from her mouth?

It is not inaccurate to say that the NSPCC benefits from the idea that child abuse is prevalent.

That's not to say that NSPCC employees don't care about children, or that they wish abuse on any child. But if abuse did stop, full stop - well, then. Every single one of them would be looking for a new job. And there is also the unsavoury possibility that employees exist who don't care about children or want abuse to stop, for whatever nefarious reasons. It happens elsewhere - refresh your memory by taking a look at the expanding map.

So what we are saying is this:

Some people, and organisations, are capable of holding two conflicting viewpoints simultaneously, often without realising:

1. I want abuse to stop. Full stop.

2. I want a decent, regular salary and job security from my children's charity position so that I can pay my bills and live my life.

Other people and organisations are well aware that their stated viewpoints are contradictory, but push forwards with the lies anyway, using meaningless placatory head pats, hastily constructed straw men and carefully created smokescreens to hide behind:

1. Having considered the responses carefully and noted the strength of feeling within the home educating community, the Government remains clear that changes should be made to existing arrangements in order to guarantee that every child receives a suitable education, wherever they are educated. However, the Government has taken account of the strong views expressed and has tailored the content of the legislation. For example local authority officers will not be given powers to insist they see the home-educated child alone, and the new monitoring system will be light touch - a head pat for home educators on January 11th 2010

2. Section 19E(4) includes a separate power for local authorities to see the child alone without the parent present. This means that local authorities may ask to see the child on their own, but the child and/or the parents can refuse to agree to such a meeting...The guidance will set out the sorts of circumstances where this power may be exercised. We envisage this would be where there is no evidence that the child has received the education described by the parents, little or no evidence that the education meets the needs of the child, or where there are doubts that the child is resident at the registration address – and where these matters can only be resolved by talking to the child without their parents present. These circumstances will be rare, but it is important that the power is available when all other efforts to establish whether education is ‘suitable’ have failed - straw men and smokescreens on January 19th 2010

Completely contradictory statements made by the DCSF, only a week apart.

Slippery, tricksy words. Let's pin them down. There either is to be a power, or there is not to be a power. If the DCSF issues caring and loving parents with Supernanny-style "consequences" such as an automatic School Attendance Order for rightly refusing to allow strangers unsupervised, unnecessary access to their children - that constitutes power over those parents. The DCSF lied. Again.

And yet the real killer is that, even when presented with the evidence, some people will still buy what the DCSF has to say. They can see with their own eyes that the most vulnerable, at risk children tend not to be hidden, and yet they can be wholeheartedly convinced into believing that innocent parents should be licensed and inspected "if it saves one child" - without considering the very real consequences. After all, if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear from forced adoption, isn't that true?

Staffordshire

Lincolnshire

Suffolk

Sometimes, it's difficult to know the motivation of someone who is putting forward two conflicting viewpoints for our consumption. Are they stupid? Brainwashed? Scared? Psychopathic?

Who knows?

The reality is that any organisation may contain a selection of people who fit into these categories, each feeding off - or feeding into - each other. It creates a can of worms; an almighty, insoluble mess. And so the most important thing any of us can do is to not blindly accept what anybody say, regardless of their credentials, simply because it is expected that we should. Or because, for example, they claim to have the professional edge on caring for what they so achingly describe as "our" children.

We should all be in pursuit of the truth.

So why might Diana Sutton of the NSPCC be saying this?

Too often we see cunning and manipulative parents actually trying to hide abuse from social workers... In case after case, we see that children haven't been spoken to on their own, so they haven't had an opportunity to actually say what is really going on. 

The NSPCC says such a change would help prevent a repeat of cases such as that of seven-year-old Khyra Ishaq, whose mother prevented social workers from seeing her alone at their Birmingham home. She weighed two stones and nine pounds when she died. Chris Cloke from the NSPCC said that abusers would "go to great lengths to conceal how the child has been treated, to cover bruises to conceal what is going on".

Stop. Think. Khyra Ishaq's mother was so "cunning and manipulative" that she and her family were already known to a whole raft of statutory and other services because of safeguarding concerns? She went to such "great lengths to conceal how the child [was] treated" that her daughter was openly stealing food from school and wandering around outside wearing only her underwear, in an emaciated condition?

Stop. Think. "Case after case"? The parents and carers of 16 of these 19 children were so "cunning and manipulative"  that they were already known to Birmingham social workers at the time of their deaths?
 
Are Diana and Chris painting a skewed picture that unthinking people will buy into? Whether they know it consciously or not, why might they want to do that?

Diana continues:

We don't want this to be a heavy-handed tool. We want it to be a legal change that will drive a change in practice so that it becomes routine that they have to - as part of the child protection inquiry - talk to the child on their own and establish directly with the child what is going on.

Stop. Think. Will this be the same legal "tool" that social workers already have at their disposal? The same legal tool that is prevented from being "heavy handed" (although some would dispute this) by the checks and balances already enshrined in law?

Or is Diana painting a skewed picture that unthinking people will buy into? Whether she knows it consciously or not, why might she want to do that?

Two key unions - organisations that exist to protect the interests of social workers and speak out on their behalf absolutely do not agree with Diana and her pals at the NSPCC:

The chief executive of the British Association of Social Workers, Hilton Dawson, said that social workers already had the power under the Children Act to seek a court order requiring parents to allow them to see children on their own. Mr Dawson told Today: "If parents blatantly refuse and manipulate or threaten to set the dog on social workers, then they have exactly the same recourse as what the NSPCC are proposing."

And Helga Pile of Unison, which represents many social workers, said she feared the proposal could be "a blunt instrument and be too heavy-handed."

These are the unions that will be picking up the pieces when thousands of children, routinely "accessed" by unsupervised and untrusted strangers, allege abuse  - or, far worse, begin to be abused - by those strangers.

Unions will be responsible for defending the professionals who will undoubtedly stand accused following the undetected abuse or death of any child, once the burden of proof lies resolutely at their feet - they, who were compelled to see every single child no matter how spurious the concerns. And still they failed!

Unions will have to field law suits filed by parents whose children are removed from them because they appeared to be so kind and loving, so unlikely to have abused their children, that a professionally hamstrung new social worker, terrified for his or her own reputation, decides that these parents must indeed be masters of cunning and manipulation. After all, what better way to spot someone who is deceitful, than by witnessing them continually deceiving you?

The same sentiments were expressed here, by Hilary Searing, who explained exactly why social workers were so opposed to ContactPoint - in July 2007:

...Social work does not want a national database of every child in this country as the problems created by such a database would far outweigh the benefits. It would effectively be the end of client confidentiality. In child protection work the principle of aiming to work with families on a voluntary basis is a good one and social workers aim to build trusting relationships with their clients. However, the danger is that once social work has become more closely aligned with an inter-agency system of surveillance and monitoring of families most people will be less open and trusting towards social workers and this will make their job more difficult.

Alas, the brave new world that Hilary predicted has already arrived, bringing us cases like that of Shahnaz Malik, who must be regretting the day she chose to live within the jurisdiction of Birmingham City Council's children's services after it was publicly shamed for making mistakes that could not be covered up, despite the costly employment of a professional PR consultant.

One would have thought that "experts" such as Diana Sutton would understand these complex issues. Indeed in this response to a DCSF workforce strategy consultation, the NSPCC did at least show that it understood the need to consult with social workers on key issues affecting their professional practice: 

...Continuing professional development for social workers and health visitors. Practical micro-skills training is needed to assist workers in handling difficult situations – for example, weighing up cumulative evidence of risk in long-term cases, how to take a history, how to insist on seeing a child alone, how to work with resistant parents/children, how to check for injuries and when a medical opinion is required. This should be based on asking social workers what they find most challenging and should be delivered in the workplace by experienced practitioners

So why, in these cash-strapped times, might the NSPCC now be advocating something that sensible social workers are Just Saying No to?

Ah. The consultation response also contains this little gem:

The NSPCC’s Training and Consultancy service works across the UK to deliver a range of services to promote understanding of child protection and safeguarding. We have developed a range of resources for different groups, such as EduCare which is an online set of training modules for people in the education sector, and CPD training for paediatricians in collaboration with the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. We would be happy to work with the CWDC and other bodies to ensure that there is a quality set of resources to assist in training the workforce...

...Ownership and accountability for various strands are made clear. For example LSCBs should be required to demonstrate that they provide a sufficient range and depth of child protection training to meet the learning outcomes of different audiences as defined in the guidance issued with Working Together to Safeguard Children and, where necessary, to prepare an action plan for improving access to inter-agency safeguarding training. We know that the availability of inter-agency training is very variable and is linked to the resources allocated to and by different LSCBs to meet local needs. This also needs to be addressed.

I see. 

Just think how "happy" the NSPCC will be to ensure there is a "quality set of resources to assist in the training of a workforce" whose caseloads of vulnerable children are to be diluted by the mandatory and wholly unnecessary interviewing of ever-increasing numbers of children. 
 
The NSPCC's scatter gun approach to selecting a hitherto unsuspected category of person, conducting its own unique brand of propagandist "research" and then labelling swathes of the population as "hidden" abusers will come as absolutely no surprise to home educating families, themselves an unsubstantiated target used by the NSPCC in an attempt to flog its training provision, using the Trojan horse of the rights of the child to do so. Anything sound familiar?

The practice of our staff highlights the importance of speaking to children alone unless that creates distress for the child; we therefore agree that local authorities should have this power. We would also note that there should be a clear record which notes reasons also for not seeing the child alone. As with Q 9 it is crucial that staff have the pre-requisite skills to communicate with children and know what to do if a child raises an issue be it about not wanting to be home educated or about abuse. The NSPCC has developed a number of resources for a range of organisations and professional groups on safeguarding and child protection. For example we have developed EduCare which is a set of modules to support people developing an understanding of child protection and knowing what to do. We would be happy to offer our support in developing resources or training for staff...

Oh, please. If you're going to sell yourself like that, get a room.

For anyone still wedded to the idea that suspicion of the children's rights movement is only the preserve of neo-con fundamentalists, then please, think again. Long and hard. If you have some time, have a read of Neil's letter as well as the full comments thread, also linked to above.

If children are to have rights independent of what their parents might think about that, then for these rights to have meaning they have to be protected, and (it is argued) that requires a certain access to the child to ensure their rights are protected, and the state inevitably steps into that 'ensuring' role, and before you know it breakfast TV this very morning reveals that the state, so roundly thwarted over trying to gain routine access to see children alone (there's a nice job for a paedophile) through the home education inspection route, has apparently changed tactic to wanting the same automatic access for social workers. Once again we are greeted by the spectacle of social workers' own professional body saying, no we don't want these powers, they undermine trust, we want better training and proper exercise of existing powers of access as a last resort only. But the NSPCC, which by now is so obviously a branch of government, lobbying it for what it wants to be lobbied for, and I am not going to apologise for saying that, wants routine access for social workers, just as it lobbied for routine access alone to the children of the home educated - Neil T

I suspect that the switched on social workers will be nodding their heads in agreement with everything that Neil has to say. They join the pile of people who have been stitched up by incompetent, clockwork, ticky box colleagues; by nest featherers and back scratchers; by snake oil sellers and vultures, by heads of service who appear to care more about protecting their reputations than protecting vulnerable children or supporting and empowering frontline staff; by embittered council busybodies who are so slobbering eager to impose their view of what "suitable" is on other people that they are willing to lie, obsfucate and violate the memory of dead and abused children for the very purpose. For a Common Purpose, perhaps? (Tony Howell, beleaguered Director of Birmingham Children's Services, is 32nd on the list.)

Sorry about that, switched on social workers. It looks like you get to carry the can filled with everybody else's worms. Let's hope for your sake - and ours - that as Tech says, the bubbles are beginning to burst.

H/T EK and other emailers who supplied link(s) for this post.