If you was to ask the average British person to name a group of public ‘servants’ who routinely abuse their power, who act as if they are god-like in their infalibility, who are unduly influenced by often failed leftist nostrums such as multiculturalism or who display supreme arrogance about themselves, it is highly likely that Social Workers and social work departments of local authorities would be mentioned more than once.
For decades the ‘expertise’ of social workers and their management has kept children with unsuitable and often downright dangerous birth parents, denied many children resident in ‘care’ the chance of adoption or most recently and scandalously, turned a blind eye to the rampant abuse of young women by Islamic Grooming Gangs. The root cause of many of these problems can often be seen to be in the placement of social engineering or socialist ideology before the rights of the child not to get beaten up by parents, not to be kept in children’s home for years just because the exact ethnic match of adopter can’t be found, or not to be continually abused by members of those groups who are considered ‘untouchable’ by much of the poltiical Left.
The litany of names of children failed by social services would fill this article and many more and whenever I have seen or attended one of these tragic child killing cases as a court reporter I’ve often thought that social workers can make things worse rather than better.
The point of this extensive introduction is to point out the latest statement from the British Association of Social Workers. They’ve waded into the debate about potential reforms to the adoption system to ensure that those children who can be placed with suitable adopters, are placed in good time and without unnecessary delay on the part of social services and also hopefully an end to politically correct reasons for refusing potential adoptive parents such as: ‘too white’, ‘too middle class’, ‘too many books’, ‘too Christian’ etc,
The Daily Telegraph of 10th December 2012 ( scan of article below) reported that plans to reduce the target time for adoptions from the current 21 months to 6 months were denounced by the British Association for Social Workers who said that such a policy would help paedophiles.
The BASW spokesperson Judith Acrerman (as well as whining for more taxpayers money) said in the article: “…if we take the scrutiny level out of adoption, I’m very worried that it will become the latest example of the abuse in children’s homes, the Catholic Church and by Jimmy Savile”
Are the BASW that desperate to hang on to their untrammeled power over the lives of the children in their ‘care’ that they are reduced to waving the ghost of Jimmy Savile around in an effort to scaremonger about paedophiles? I don’t recall the BASW being so forthright about safeguarding children from nonces in places like Rotherham, in fact I dont’ recall them being very vocal about this issue at all. Come to think of it, were not those children’s homes that Ms Acreman was speaking about run by local authourity social work or children’s departments? The BASW should consider whether or not it is wise to throw stones when you live in a house with a substantial area of glazing.
I’m completely disgusted by this scaremongering by the BASW. The position for the inmates in Britain’s children’s homes is appalling. Children, taken by social workers far too late from violent and dangerously abusive and neglectful parents, arrive at children’s home substantially damaged. The care home experience itself is not condusive to either helping to repair the damaged young person nor fitting them for future life. If a camel is as horse designed by a committee then local authority care is the family designed by committee.
With such a list of achievements, the dead children like Tyra Henry* and Jasmine Beckford, the chidlren abused so badly that they are disabled for life, the stunted life chances of those children who stay in Local Authority ‘care’ for far too long and their professional arrogance, is there any reason why what social work organisations say shouldn’t be examined more closely. As social services departments too often say, after the death of a child under their supervision, that ‘lessons have been learned’, should the public and elected politicians now learn our own lessons about social services, one of which is that social work, as run by the state, just isn’t working.
Too often elected representatives have not challenged what they are told by senior social services practitioners, the politicians have lazily accepted the words of the ‘experts’. and this has ended up with a child protection system that is completely non transparent and often damages the children that it has in their care. If you don’t believe me about the damage that LA ‘care’ does to a child just look at the outcomes of those who have experienced LA care, many of them the illiterate ones filling up prison cells, the junkies, the mad and the sad. Basically LA care really screws you up.
It is long past time that the ideology, methods, attitudes and practices within Britian’s social work departments were opened up to public scrutiny. That could do more for the welfare of looked after children than keeping the adoption period at 21 months.
Although I have a lot to argue about with the current coalition regarding its policies, I feel that credit must go to Michael Gove and others in government as at last the stones of obscurantism that social services and teachers work under are being lifted, and we in the general public are starting to see the stinking worm eaten mess that lies beneath. Reform of education and social work should be on a similar par with sorting out the economy, otherwise society will continue to have to pay for the care of children whose damage was often compounded by the actions of our often unnaccountable and arrogant social services departments.
Links and notes
*Note: I attended the Tyra Henry case in 1984 for professional reasons and because I was in the well of the court I saw the evidence pictures that were not disclosed to the media and they will haunt me for the rest of my life.
The Daily Telegraph said in 2002 about the Tyra Henry case:
“In 1984 Tyra Henry, aged 22 months, died two days after being left at a hospital under a false name with 50 bite marks on her body. Her father Andrew beat both Tyra and her mother Claudette, who had been out on the night he launched the final assault.
Despite a previous decision that she should not do so, Tyra was allowed to live with her father when he was discharged from prison.
Before her birth he had assaulted her six-month-old brother, Tyrone, so viciously that the boy was left blind, permanently brain damaged and in care.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1416526/Number-of-child-cruelty-cases-rising.html
This case also had elements of political correctness as the white social workers felt that they had to be more trusting to black clients. The Guardian said in 2003:
“1984
Tyra Henry died after being battered and bitten by her father, Andrew Neil, while in local authority care. Neil was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for the 21-month-old baby’s murder. A report on the case found that the white social workers from Lambeth council tended to be too trusting of the family because they were black. John Patten, then a junior social services minister, published new guidelines on child abuse cases for social workers soon after.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/jan/27/childrensservices.childprotection
