Sacrifice the few to protect the many?

The row sparked by The Telegraph and the story (I use that word advisedly) that they ran regarding Rotherham and the removal of foster children from UKIP voting parents has provoked some interesting debate.

I do not refer to the obvious debate regarding the rights and wrongs of what happened in Rotherham, but instead the debate about the response to the story.

The Guardian has printed a fuller account of why the children were removed from their parents and subsequently removed from their foster carers. In doing so they vindicated the Rotherham decision but also revealed a lot of sensitive information about the children.

Concerns have been raised about the children in this row and how this further information release may effect them. These are valid concerns and whatever else we do we must always remember our job is first and foremost to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our service users.

But I believe there is a bigger picture here. For as long as I can remember the vast majority of negative press about social work intervention is not countered. A story will hit the press and it will be detailed, the detail will be damning to the social workers and/or Local Authority. The Local Authority will issue a press release which will (can)not go into detail and essentially what we get is a weak rebuttal of the original story. Often as social workers we are able to read between the lines of the story and form a view about what may have happened, the general public are not able to do this. Chalk up another point for those who seek to attack our profession.

Another area where the public image of our profession is tarnished are shows (radio and tv) where members of the general public tell their stories of social work interventions in their lives. I have listened to many accounts on radio phone-ins of children that have been removed for seemingly no good reason from loving parents. I have then listened to the outpouring of sympathy for the parents. The parents recounting these accounts do so safe in the knowledge that they can pretty much say what they want without fear of breaching data protection or slander laws. If by some miracle the social workers involved in these cases were listening to the radio phone-in they could not counter the allegations because they know that aside from any data protection law there may be emotional harm to the children by dragging up the detail.

As a profession we normally maintain either a dignified silence (endlessly interpreted as being secretive) or we talk in general terms and as such our counter arguments are poor. We do so knowing that have protected children, but that protection is at a cost to our professional reputations. ‘So what?’ you may ask, ‘at least the children are protected’.

I believe that our professional reputation has been so eroded that it seriously effects our ability to carry out our work. We need the trust and mutual respect of the families we work with to plan and implement effective interventions. If a family does not trust us, or value the help we attempt to provide, this does not make the situation safer for children. We cannot form partnerships with parents and we cannot prevent bad situations getting worse.

Essential in our role is empowerment. We seek to empower families with our interventions with the end goal of improving the lives of children. The erosion of professional reputation is empowering people, but it is empowering them to resist our help.

This situation is bad enough, but now we are beginning to hear calls from those in power to bring children into the care system earlier. Mr Gove tells us we should be intervening earlier to prevent harm to children, we should stop giving bad parents chances and remove their children.

This is now a two pronged attack on families. Firstly they resist our help, spurred on by the perception that basically we do not know what we are doing. Secondly we are pushed to remove children sooner and as a result of families resisting early intervention this will possibly be the right thing to do.

The end result of this is a lot of empowered families finding that their strength to resist our early intervention has led to them losing their children.

The Children Act (1989) makes the child’s welfare paramount. But the spirit of the act is about preserving the family unit and removal is the last resort. We are now in a discussion where removal is not the last resort, indeed it feels that early intervention will become about removing the child. Strange coming from a right wing government which would traditionally be running away from state intervention in the family. I can only conclude it is a populist, knee-jerk reaction to the various child abuse scandals which have recently surfaced involving high profile public figures.

Coming back to the original point of this post I believe that Rotherham were right to release the details of what happened. I think we need to look at the bigger picture and understand that if we do not defend the decisions we make with detail, our profession will be so damaged that will not be able to do our job.

The risk of emotional harm to the ‘few’ is one that has to be taken if we are to protect the welfare of the ‘many’. And let us not forget it is never the profession of social work which takes these stories to a wider public audience.