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What would you think if you heard a woman shout “I’ll cut the legs off you!” at her children? That she was exasperated by their behaviour and at the end of her tether? Or that she was intent on injuring them?
Twenty years ago, a top psychologist at a London hospital overheard an Irish mother shout just that at her kids, decided they were at risk and convened an emergency child protection meeting. Social workers and other professionals summoned at short notice were shocked that he was apparently unable to differentiate between the colloquial language used by a woman from a different culture and a serious threat of harm.
Or what about this scenario: two social workers visit a house where a boy is displaying signs of mania. He rampages through the house, destroying everything in his path. He is out of control. One of the social workers sees he is clearly in mental distress, while the other gently explains that there is no problem, he’s “just working class”.
Assumptions in any given context can be risky, but in social work they can have dangerous repercussions.
Social work attitudes looked at retrospectively can seem naive. Practice may have come a long way, but there will always be issues that challenge social workers. One recent case, involving a gay foster couple approved by Wakefield Council who were later convicted of abusing boys in their care, has provided the latest evidence of that.
Social workers at the Yorkshire council missed signs that Ian Wathey and Craig Faunch were abusing boys placed in their care between 2003 and 2005. An inquiry report into the case, published in August, quotes one member of staff as saying: “The fear of being seen as prejudiced, the risk of talking about the words gay and paedophile together, was too great. There was a pervasive anxiety that, if this view was put forward in writing or verbally, the person putting it forward would be accused of being prejudiced and homophobic.”
Another staff member said: “You don’t want to reflect negatively on gay couples, especially in social services. I’d be thinking ‘am I being prejudiced, is it my own prejudice making me doubt the skills of these carers, these two gay men, is it because I’m homophobic?’, rather than just asking the simple question ‘are they abusing kids?’.”
Clouded judgments
The report concludes: “It is clear that there were forces at work in this case about sexuality which clouded workers’ ability to observe, interpret, think and make judgments in a way which should have been expected of professionally qualified social work practitioners and managers.”
This fear, the report argues, led to the “usual rules of social work practice not being followed”. In one of a number of “pivotal moments” in the case, one professional accepted an explanation from the carers that they had taken a picture of one of the boys urinating to teach him to close the door when he used the toilet. The worker believed there was “no malice or sinister intent and was the result of their naivety and lack of parenting experience”.
Report author Brian Parrott says social workers felt uncomfortable professionally and personally about same-sex relationships. “There is sometimes an anxiety in people about issues related to their own sexuality, as well other people’s. That is a deeply uncomfortable subject for many people and social workers are no different.”
Archive for October 21st, 2007
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Struggling young families with nowhere else to turn may lose their valuable Hemel Hempstead support group since its funding was slashed by Herts County Council. Home-Start Dacorum is run almost entirely by volunteers but relies on council funding to supply a handful of paid staff. It reaches out to young families who are feeling the pressure of raising small children and offers them friendship and practical support. These include new parents Adam and Zoe Marland, who say Home-Start gave them a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ when Zoe suffered from depression after their first child, Xavier, was born in March. Adam, of The Cornfields, said: “We have a volunteer home visitor who really helps us out. She pops round once a week for a couple of hours and helps out with the baby and the tidying. “If you are depressed and looking after a newborn every day then someone says ‘I’m going to come to your house, free of charge, help you out and give you support,’ that offers you a light at the end of the tunnel.” The free service is treasured by some 100 families across Dacorum, but with recent blows to their income staff say they may have to cut ties with around 60 of them.
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Two thirds of GPs want the limit for abortions reduced from 24 weeks, a survey shows. Research by Marie Stopes International, a charity which carries out a third of abortions in Britain, found family doctors wanted the limit for social abortions to be brought down to between 20 and 23 weeks. It comes after MPs heard conflicting evidence about the survival chances of babies born extremely prematurely. One doctor said survival at 23 weeks had improved while others said it had not, remaining at less than 15 per cent. Today’s survey found that half of GPs also support a relaxation of the law to allow abortion on request up to 14 weeks, which would remove the need for two doctors to sign off on each case. One in five GPs said they were anti-abortion with the rest as broadly pro-choice, while three in five agree that allowing girls under 16 to have an abortion without their parents’ knowledge or consent was satisfactory. Liz Davies, director of UK operations at Marie Stopes, said: “We are delighted to find such strong endorsement from general practitioners for a change in the law to remove the archaic requirement for two doctors to provide written consent in order for any first trimester abortion to proceed. “Contrary to popular belief we do not currently have abortion on request in Britain, unlike most other European countries and reform is long overdue.”
A call to all social enterprises
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SHETLAND Council of Social Services is organising a social enterprise networking event to highlight this particular form of business, early next month.Social Enterprises (SE) on the isles potentially includes community halls and development companies.COPE Ltd is a well known and established local enterprise, running several ventures throughout the islands. Organiser Wendy Hand of SCSS, said the aim of the event was to give community businesses and organisations a chance to share knowledge, experience and expertise then gain funding for their projects.“Social enterprise is something that the government really wants to push forward. There is quite a lot of SE in Shetland, that don’t realise that they are one.“This does open different doors and there is lots of funding that can be available, they can go out for tenders for a lot of things. “I think as a bigger group they will have more clout
and there is a lot of experience within these groups that can be shared with smaller ones to help them develop,” she said.Presentations at this initial event will focus on highlighting the growing recognition of the significance of these enterprises throughout Scotland and the UK.
Behind closed doors
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Society still needs to come to terms with abuse of older and disabled people. Do we need a shake-up of complaints and investigation? Chris Mahony reports
Child abuse was once Britain’s guilty secret. It may have taken 25 years of introspection, but we have broadly come to acknowledge its nasty reality. Now there is a growing sense that the abuse of vulnerable adults occupies a similar, half-concealed place in our national self-image.
The evidence is starting to mount. Research funded jointly by the Department of Health and the charity Comic Relief, and published in June, estimated that 342,000 people aged 66 or over were last year victims of abuse in their own homes, ranging from financial fraud to emotional abuse and even assault. The number of victims is more than the population of Leicester and equates to 4%, or one in 25, of all older people living in the community.
The research, carried out over two years by the National Centre for Social Research and King’s College, London, was based on interviews with 2,000 people. It excluded those with dementia and those living in care homes, lending credence to a report in the British Medical Journal as long ago as 1992 which estimated that 500,000 older people were suffering abuse at any one time. Yet in the intervening 15 years, notwithstanding the efforts of campaign groups such as Action on Elder Abuse, which made the case for the new research, the issue has remained relatively low-profile and low-priority.
One aspect of this has been the emphasis – or lack of emphasis – placed on complaints of abuse of older and disabled people. In this context, the health secretary, Alan Johnson, may have been interpreted as donning a hair shirt at last month’s Labour party conference when, speaking about yet another shake-up of regulation in health and social care, he reassured delegates: “The new regulator will have a much stronger focus on safety and quality across all health and adult social care services.”
Elaborating on the minister’s words, a Department of Health spokeswoman says: “There has been a lot of talk about this over the last 10 or 20 years and he was acknowledging that this [emphasis on safety] has not always been done. There has not always been the focus. Now we want some action, not just words.”
No doubt with an eye on this and on the regulatory shake-up that will form part of a health and social care bill, the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (Adass) has issued its own, seven-point manifesto on the issue of abuse of vulnerable adults (see box, left). One of the points is a call for social workers to have a right of entry into people’s homes, in association with the police, to investigate suspected adult abuse. Another is a requirement on the new regulator to work with local authorities in “identifying and responding to instances of potential abuse and neglect”.
Letters extra
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Highlights from the Society Guardian postbag
Funding concernsThere were some positive developments in last week’s comprehensive spending review (CSR). In particular, the social exclusion taskforce’s new emphasis on adults with mental health needs or learning disabilities is overdue and welcome. If the resulting public service agreement provides more support for those adults when they seek settled accommodation, employment, education and training, this will give people a real chance of living a fulfilling life. However, the increase in the budget for adult social care announced in the CSR is still too low to ensure that all vulnerable adults receive decent care services. As the Commission for Social Care Inspection has warned, social care is already being severely rationed in many parts of the country .The level of the increase in the budget falls far below that projected by the Wanless social care review to allow for growing demands for funding, particularly with an ageing population.
A less obvious problem may be the planned cuts to the budget of the Department for Work and Pensions, which could further marginalise employment support services for adults with learning disabilities. Provision is patchy and accorded low priority, despite the huge benefits that employment can provide in terms of tackling social exclusion and reducing people’s dependence on welfare benefits. We can only hope the focus on vulnerable adults in the new public service agreement will prove itself by ensuring these valuable services not only survive but grow.Su Sayer, chief executive, United Response
Relationships matterA thinktank talking about “levers” for NHS system reform as Jennifer Dixon of the Kings Fund did! (Nice details, shame about the bigger picture, October 10) Social systems – and anything that involves people is one – are very different from mechanical systems (machines). Levers have no part to play at all. If you are serious about system’s transformation, you focus on the relationships between the parts, not on the parts/structures. You organise around the flow of information. Form does not follow function (mechanical), but rather in-formation. Change is always internal. The question is far less about ministers coming up with solutions and far more about uncovering what stops the system using the intelligence it could have access to: ranging from patients own expertise, why operating rooms are often inefficient to the future impact of technology. A shared, grounded theory of system’s change would help everyone.
Second thoughts
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Let’s show respect for children’s social work
A few weeks ago, the cry went up from my nine-year-old daughter at the laptop: “Oh, no, it’s the social worker!” It turned out that the appearance of the social worker on her Sims computer game signalled that her computer child was being taken away due to neglect.
With children’s views of social workers already entrenched as quasi-child-snatchers, it is not difficult to see how their parents easily empathise with a tabloid-fuelled image of social workers as contributing to the problems of vulnerable families, rather than as part of the solution for helping them. A recent General Social Care Council survey found that only 40% of people viewed the contribution of social workers as “very important”.
Yet good social workers are as crucial to the wellbeing of vulnerable children or to the survival of damaged families as a doctor is to the health of his patient or a teacher to the learning chances of her pupil. They are a key element in the tools we need to deal with what the Conservative party has identified as our “broken society”. Not to recognise as much, and just to point the finger of blame when something goes wrong, is shortsighted and a false economy.
To that end, the Conservative party set up a commission of practitioners, service users and other experts last year to find solutions rather than apportion blame. Our report, No More Blame Game – The Future for Children’s Social Workers, is published this week after a year of taking more than 100 written and oral submissions at Westminster.
Our findings start with the need for a more cohesive professional leadership for social workers, akin to that of the British Medical Association or Royal College of Nursing, which the British Association of Social Workers, with just 11,000 members, has thus far regrettably failed to provide.
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Changes to the London Child Protection Procedures follow the publication of national guidelines and a year long consultation across the capital’s Local Safeguarding Children’s Boards.
Download: London Child Protection Procedures 2007
Procedures and protocols – Merton Local Safeguarding Children BoardThe procedures outline the roles and responsibilities of agencies involved with children and how they should work together to ensure their safety.They address such issues as what to do if there are concerns about a child, what factors may indicate there’s a problem and how to refer the matter to the relevant authorities.Cabinet Member for Children’s Services, Councillor Debbie Shears, says: “All statutory or voluntary organisations working with children need to be aware of the changes. The procedures will only be effective if people understand them and act upon them.”London’s children should all be able to grow up in circumstances where they are safe and supported, so that they can achieve their optimal outcomes throughout childhood, their teenage years and into adulthood.To achieve this, agencies need to work together to promote children’s welfare and prevent them from suffering harm. Children who are being or who are likely to be harmed are safeguarded best when safeguarding procedures are consistent across London.
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A SCHOOL head teacher today won a High Court order requiring the destruction of social service files including allegations that he had indecently assaulted girl pupils. The headmaster from Cheshire, who can only be referred to as “Mr K”, was acquitted in the early 1990s. But the files were retained for child protection purposes and the headmaster began a long legal battle with the backing of the National Association of Head Teachers . Today he was successful when Mr Justice Burton, sitting at the High Court in London, ruled that there was no justification for breaking a promise that the files – compiled after an investigation to see if his son was at risk – would be destroyed. The judge said Mr K’s human rights had been breached and declared: “The sooner these files are destroyed the better.” He said that, unless there was an appeal, they should be disposed of within 14 days. Lawyers for Halton borough council had argued that the Government had decided it was in “the public interest” that child care files should be retained for longer than in the past following the conviction of Ian Huntley for the murder of the Soham schoolgirls. The judge said: “Clearly we all know not only how important it is to protect children, and many lessons have been learned from such matters as the Huntley case.”
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VIOLENT children are “laughing at parents” due to changes in laws on smacking and a lack of support from social services – says a partially sighted woman from Morecambe who claims her 12-year-old daughter beats her up.
The desperate mum, who alleges her daughter threatened to kill her and battered her so severely on one occasion that she had to go to hospital, believes the Government has taken away the rights of parents to discipline their kids when they misbehave.She also claims to have pleaded with social services to take her daughter into care “for my protection and for hers” – but they refused.This is despite claims that the schoolgirl has:n Threatened to kill her mum and also threatened to kill herself in a suicide pact with her best friend.n Put her in hospital after a violent assault – this when her daughter was only seven.n Attacked her on at least five other occasions – sometimes with kicks, punches, bites, nips, scratches and by throwing objects.n Stayed out after school until 10.30pm, got into trouble and had to be escorted home by police.”She will end up in front of a judge, or worse,” said her mum.”She’s threatened to kill me and she’s threatened to kill herself. Her and her best mate have threatened to run away together. They have this pact where they will take their own lives. I’m worried she will actually go through with it.”Stricter laws on child discipline – making some forms of smacking illegal – came in two years ago and the woman believes this was a mistake.
