How do we protect these children? There must be more we all can do!

[AnotherThingToDo]

I’m haunted by these poor children who have to endure this torture. How many more are there who aren’t in the news because they haven’t died?

Experts, people in child-protection roles, people with experience: how can people who feel angry and devastated by this channel this emotion into actually making a difference?

We hear time and time again how resources are limited. Is there more that society can do?

[quote IncessantNameChanger]@SafeguardingSocialWorker well it seems you two excuses to go back write up that every thing was fine and close the cases both within a hour each. Win win for you.

That isnt how it works in my county. You could not close a case by someone not opening a door.

What you can do in my county is cancel enough meetings at the last minute that parents start to actively avoid you to come off radar. Then you can say they are refusing to engage. Try it. It might make your job more rewarding again.

Clearly there needs to be national policy to follow.

Btw I cant write national policy. I cant recruit civil servants and I cant write you a check so to be clear I cant do anything to change anything.

What I could do for you would be ignore any concerns I see. But I'm never going to do that.

However as a parent of a child who has a disability SW who does nothing and has nothing to offer on a personal level I am actively off radar and on the books but very invisible. Reading this thread has reminded me why my own disabled child is safer invisible and not seen at legally required times. My child is being failed but everyone else wins.[/quote]
Where have I said that's what would happen?

I'm asking, what would the people posting on this thread criticising do in those situations?

Maybe consider who you vote for? Both central and local public service have been reduced for years.

This is at the heart of it. Bham CC has had something like £600milliion cut from it's budget since 2010. Nobody can possibly claim that doesn't have an impact. Every publicly funded agency is on it's knees.
There aren't enough police to respond to incidents; paramedics; social workers; youth workers; CAMHS; FSWs; all the support teams across the Council; HVs have HUGE caseloads; all the Universal groups that used to run in places like the Children's Centres, that did fantastic work in both building trust and in 'seeing' U5s that otherwise are never seen by anyone outside their home. Bham CC has dropped from 75 Children's Centres at one point, to 10. That is for a City with a really high % of children amongst a population of 1.1million people. Nurseries and schools are now staffed to an absolute minimum, and staff are dealing with more and more significant needs (SEND, poverty and hunger, social care needs) at the same time as no longer having the pastoral staff to follow anything up. The 'bar' for social care to investigate is so high, due to the staff numbers being so low compared with the demand.
I'm not party political at all. Yes, things have got a whole lot worse since 2010, but they weren't great before that either.

There will always be some bitterly twisted and evil people in the World, what we (as in, the Country as a whole) could do, is choose to fund the services that try to step in to a level where they can actually do some early intervention work rather than constantly trying to crisis manage and just keep plates spinning.

I know this thread is about child abuse at the moment, but the sparsity of support is the same in people trafficking; in so many youths carrying knives, machetes, and guns; in county lines; in radicalisation; etc etc etc. So much could be done if the services were properly funded, but successive Governments start from the premise of "How cheaply can we do this" rather than "What is the best outcome we could aim for"

P.S And yes there are mistakes, failings, poor practice, lack of communication etc as well.

Either remove to what you know will likely be a life of abuse in foster care

So you've worked in the field and you know this is the case? I think most people kind of assume this but it's a bit shocking that you've said it so matter of factly there.

So what is the point of us all getting upset and vowing to report the next time we feel something isn't right? Sounds like kids are jumping out if the frying pan into the fire.

Why is our care system so shit?

Every day I realise that this country is actually not that great at all.

I think education, health care and social welfare services should be removed from party politics. They’re too important to be fiddled about with by government. They should be solely in the control of the civil service, guided by public volunteer steering groups.

GreenLunchBox
As I said before, the amount of social worker visits, medical appointments, school meetings would make this almost impossible.
Two different social workers having 6 weekly visits, unannounced visits, checks of the child, the house, the family. Twice a year LAC reviews involving every service involved with the child.
If after all of this a child in foster care was being abused then the social workers must have their eyes closed and fingers in their ears!!!
If any child in foster care gets abused the social worker has a lot to answer.

@Cassimin

GreenLunchBox As I said before, the amount of social worker visits, medical appointments, school meetings would make this almost impossible. Two different social workers having 6 weekly visits, unannounced visits, checks of the child, the house, the family. Twice a year LAC reviews involving every service involved with the child. If after all of this a child in foster care was being abused then the social workers must have their eyes closed and fingers in their ears!!! If any child in foster care gets abused the social worker has a lot to answer.

I was thinking of children's homes, but you've made me realise the poster was talking about foster care. I'm just wondering why are children's homes so bad? It's like a cliche that we just accept

Your manifesto sounds good to me!

@RadishRose

Social workers don’t kill and abuse children but sadly some parents do. SW are already under a huge amount of pressure, don’t have a crystal ball and sometimes make mistakes just like every other professional. Making them criminally liable just means there will be no one left to do the job or they will become so risk averse that every child referred to them would be in court for removal. Is that what we want - rather than trying to improve conditions so that children can live safely at home?

Personally I think far, far more needs to be done before social services are even involved. All parents should have access to Early Help type services, parenting courses, well resourced health visitors etc with no shame attached. At the moment we are sent home with a tiny bundle and not much idea of what to do. Support should be available at every stage until your child is 18. People are afraid to say they can’t cope in case their children are removed. Most of us do our best based on what we saw when we grew up. Some of us had good parents, supportive networks and family around us but too many of us have experienced poor parenting and live in fractured communities and then struggle to know how to be a great parent ourselves. Let’s invest in teaching ALL parents/prospective parents how to do a fantastic job. Let’s strengthen communities. Let’s teach children what they should experience at home - what isn’t right. That’s where the investment is needed and then maybe things won’t get bad enough to need SS intervention quite so often.

This and the posts from @SWLouise are good reflections of the issues facing social workers, and the impossibility of getting any decent support for children and families. Criminalising social workers will just lead to nobody doing what is already a tough and misunderstood job. It’s already almost impossible to keep workers in the field, leading to a lack of experienced staff.

I had a caseload of 32 families - families, not children - most of whom I was supposed to see weekly. You simply cannot achieve the impossible in this scenario, it’s firefighting. It’s shit.

And @IncessantNameChanger the idea of “pushing back” is laughable, you really think a local authority cares what a social worker says? I tried when I was a child protection social worker. I was very loud and confrontational about the dangers of the caseload I had. Nobody in management listened, I was forcefully shut down. It was impossible. So I did what, in reality, is the only actual option open to social workers in this situation.

I left.

Replaced by a newly qualified social worker. And this is how it goes.

GreenLunchBox
I would imagine most of not all of the abuse is outside of the residential unit.
Vulnerable children will be prayed on by abusers, like in Rochdale.
I doubt with all of the safeguarding in children’s homes there is any opportunity for staff to abuse the children on the premises.
Of course this can’t be 100%, there will always be manipulative predators but again with the amount of professionals around the child if they are all doing their job properly this shouldn’t happen.

@nitsandwormsdodger

Don’t wait to be sure Report report report Any tiny thing that a kid says or does that is a concern , don’t mull it over, or wait to be certain or concern yourself with the ramifications —Just report !

Erm this case was reported with photo evidence from the boys grandmother the boys stepmother (monster) had 4 children taken from her already and social services still never acted so report as much as you want but if ss don't have the resources it goes nowhere!

I left.

Replaced by a newly qualified social worker. And this is how it goes.

Yup. I left too. And now I can cheerily say my job to new people and they don't look at me sideways. I use the same skills in a vastly easier and less fraught job. For a couple of years, when people asked what I did I said, "I'm a socialworkernotchildprotection" Because the second the words 'social worker' came out of your face, some people's expression would change. A lot of people HATE social workers. Particularly social workers trying to protect children. Imagine having a job where you spend hours desperately trying to help people, go out for a drink and get told you're a cunt. That's social work.

And it would all be worth it if you had the resources to do what you wanted for families. But 'pushing back' doesn't work. When I finally retire I'm having 'why don't you just...' cross-stitched on a sampler for my wall. Everyone knows a really easy way to fix SW. Ignoring the intelligent, caring, wonderful, hard-working people who actually know what they're doing telling you there isn't an easy fix. There are fixes, just not easy ones.

Brits are weird about children. On the one hand you have people fantasising about all the violent acts they'd carry out on adults who hurt children, while on the other it's perfectly socially acceptable to say that you hate them. It's like children exist in a space removed from other people, in psychic terms, for Brits.

Women's Aid released a report in 2004 called Twenty Nine Child Homicides. About the 29 child homicides caused in the previous ten years by a parent (all fathers) after a separation where domestic violence or controlling behaviour was a factor.

They released another in 2016 called Nineteen Child Homicides. Again all child murders within the previous ten years.

Their recommendations should go into law and be required reading for all family court officers.

Fund social services departments adequately, give social workers reasonable case loads, not impossible. I'd say push to hire more social workers, but it probably wouldn't be necessary if they weren't quitting in droves in their first year because the job is so badly supported and resourced. It must cost millions. Can't we just spend that money on properly resourcing social workers who WANT to do the job?

Fix the total and utter mess/shambles that is CAMHS. Support children before they grow up to be broken, damaged adults. It won't prevent everything but it would make a massive difference. Adult mental health support needs proper funding and resourcing as well.

Bring back Sure Start, it was brilliant at early identification of families who needed support and crucially, at being the missing link. If you feel targeted by social services (compounded by never having learned good conflict resolution skills) how can you work with them and accept support? It just leads to hostility which helps nobody. The family support workers at Sure Start spent time with families and got to know them so that people felt they were on their side. It makes an incredible difference in terms of engagement, makes social workers' job 1000 times easier and it is ridiculously cheap as family support workers don't need years of training. Just utter madness and political posturing to defund them.

@BertieBotts those are excellent ideas but they all cost money. And the British public, whilst happy to cry over children like Arthur, is simply not prepared to pay to keep them safe. But dont worry, they'll all be out waving pitchforks and demanding justice for the next one. And the next one.

That's an interesting point, @Batshaver. The difference in how children are viewed and treated in the UK vs certain parts of Europe, especially Southern Europe (Italy, Spain), used to be very noticeable. Their bars and restaurants, for example, would be full of families with children, and staff and other punters would enjoy them being there, fusing over babies, etc., while over here many or most restaurants didn't welcome children. You often had to check beforehand, and the default positron seemed to be that children were a nuisance other adults had to be spared from unless in designated spaces. I thought things had got much better, but mine are teenagers now, so perhaps I don't notice.

There are bad people everywhere, not just in the UK, that's for sure. But do you think that we have ingrained negative attitudes towards children that may allow monsters like Tustin and Hughes to get away with for longer, or to cause deeper harm (out even kill) before being detected?

I’m surprised no one has mentioned the obvious problem that GPs have for the most part refused to see people face to face.

*Does anyone actually feel they've done enough just blaming people who have chosen a life of dealing with things you don't want to deal with. Everyone knows what the SW should have done in hindsight. Everyone. But if every SW removed every child who might be at risk, two things would happen. The already terrible care system would break down. And SWs would be accused even more than they are of being baby snatchers.

Are all the people who never make a mistake in their job planning to retrain as SWs? Or become foster families? Or is it that you know how impossible those roles are and you don't want to do them but it makes you feel better to say you could. And then continue to let someone else do it?

Every single one of us makes mistakes at work. But in the case of SWs, doctors, nurses and others, those mistakes are terrifying. And believe me, when I was a SW I didn't sleep well*

Mrsterrypratchet this is such a great post I'd really like to share it on social media as written by an anonymous ex sw. Would you mind?

Absolutely agree that Sure Start, Children’s Centres and community based Family Support Workers are crucial to this.

Have just realised I made an error in a previous post, SW here didn’t visit schools during early lockdown as the schools would not let them but they were certainly back in as quickly as they could be.

Yep. Not prepared to pay, and not prepared to adjust our attitudes and sense of entitlement to allow for wider questioning and access powers that might prevent future tragedies, @Porcupineintherough.

I understand it costs money, but how much does it cost to house violent criminals in prison who are that way because they grew up in traumatising circumstances? How much does it cost to house somebody in a mental health facility? A mother and baby facility?

How much does it cost to keep chasing terrified/angry/triggered parents endlessly who cannot engage because they see the social worker as a threat?

How much does it cost to house a child in foster care because they are not safe to live with their parents, because early intervention failed or was not available? How much does it cost to move that child between foster families, because there was a shortage initially and they were placed somewhere non-ideal? How much does it cost to house that child in an institution because they were removed far too late/too many moves and the foster family now can't cope with their extreme behaviour? (Not to mention the immense cost to the child, but if we're going purely financial). How much does a child like this cost in behavioural support in schools? Specialist school places? How much does it cost to keep training, hiring, orientating new teachers, because NQTs often leave due to the load of behaviourally challenging, unsupported children in schools.

How much does it cost to keep training and orientating new social workers who leave within a year? How much does it cost to have serious investigations into failures that are inevitable because too many adults are traumatised, social workers are overworked and systems are overloaded?

Lockdowns haven't helped but it's a red herring; this pattern was established well before Covid.

Sure start was cheap (little training for staff and basically a small building where tea/coffee/toast/fruit/craft supplies were provided, often doubling as a clinic space for health visitors and meeting space for TAF meetings, among other things) and this study shows that 6% of the costs were saved just in hospitalisations! Imagine how many costs were saved in relation to education, or social care, or policing, or community health support. And the potential compound effects of those savings across generations.
ifs.org.uk/publications/14139

I am not saying Sure Start would solve everything, obviously, but using it as an example of an intervention which people write off as "expensive" but in reality carries far more value in terms of money that does not need to be spent dealing with bigger problems further down the line. It is simply political that these investments are not made. If you looked at the finances by themselves then of course it makes sense to invest in things that save money later.

I actually did look into training as a SW, but then I moved to a country where I'm not fluent in the language and that's a bit more of a barrier than I'd like so it's not something I'm pursuing at the moment. I also had concerns about caseloading and dealing with hostile families, it seems like an impossible job.

It doesnt work like that though. Spending lots of money on "locking up criminals" is being "tough on crime" and is popular with the general public. Sure start is pandering to "single mums and scroungers", which isnt. As a society we are pretty thick and short sighted. Very poor at linking what we ask for and what we get.

Do people honestly think that sure start would have made a difference and stopped these two forcing salt down the boys mouth?

I am not saying that they didn’t do good (though the evidence isn’t overwhelming) but I don’t think they would have saved Arthur.

I’m taking the view that I will control what I can in my world. I’ve signed up to volunteer with home start, I’ve also reported someone to social services before and someone else to the police. (Both were found to be the right decision, unfortunately).
I think we need to do what we can, keep an eye out for children. If we hear abuse don’t think ‘oh I won’t get involved’.
I do feel so utterly helpless in this case though, it kept me awake last night. Poor Arthur.

what case are we specifically talking about? , sorry I'm unaware x