Do social workers and the courts get it wrong sometimes? TW child abuse.

[Monthlymusing]

Obviously we know they get it wrong in that they tragically miss cases of abuse. This is about the other way round. Inspired by Marten and Gordon trial (please don’t discuss this specific case as it’s on going) I have fallen down an internet rabbit hole about the parents who truly believe that social services are out to snatch children from loving homes. There are thousands of them. Networks of people who help and advise people how to escape SS. There are open FB groups where parents share horror stories. I came across a ‘documentary’ on YouTube that was quite well presented, although I realise as a sane person, a good bit of anti ss propaganda. They interviewed many ‘middle class’ sorts of parents who all claimed their dc had been taken on imagined or fabricated allegations. One couples child had then tragically died in foster care, which made them feel vindicated as they had raised concerns the child wasn’t being properly cared for. The allegations against them were very extreme, almost unbelievable and involved family SA. This was quite some time ago but they have been very public about their case. They are actually in my LA, which was graded as inadequate for SS.

My thoughts are that if SS have concerns they are most likely correct and there are many parents getting away with abuse and hardly any wrongly accused to the point of losing their children. But like the police, presumably in a very small number of cases, it stands to reason that they sometimes do get it catastrophically wrong. Or are there enough ‘layers’ and enough professionals on each case that this is basically impossible?

I have no doubt that there are times they get it wrong both ways, either not removing the child or by removing them. However, it’s likely that the vast majority of the time there are justifiable and good reasons to suggest that removal (or to not remove) is the right thing to do. Without being able to predict the future, it has to be based on what the expectation is and what history has shown.

I think it would be vanishingly small, minuscule.

I have met through voluntary work people who have very haphazard chaotic lives.

women that have lost children because they have a violent partner, but he doesn’t touch the kids so they hate SS. I also knew of a baby and Mother removed because the DD who had SN and who had the mental capacity of a primary aged school child got PG. The Mother was an alcoholic in denial. She still says what SS did was wrong. She could not keep her DD safe at all.

When it comes to SA families are often in denial, you just need to read the many threads on here where a woman won’t see family as they keep the child abuser as part of the family. She is then the outcast.

I don’t think it is as simple as getting it right or wrong in the majority of cases.

I do think parents who have their children removed have a rough ride though, rightly or wrongly. Huge generalisations but they tend to be poor, lack basic skills and disadvantaged generally and certainly can’t navigate a court successfully.

I work with children in care. The legal threshold for removal of children from parents is (rightly) very high. In the majority of cases it happens as a result of ongoing persistent neglect which hasn’t improved after a lot of support from professionals, so there is ample evidence which the courts have in front of them. It also happens as a result of observation or disclosure of abuse. In practice it is very hard to remove a child from parents and those parents who don’t accept their child coming into care may be in denial about how bad things were, or unable to recognise how bad things were, or inclined to minimise, deny or try to excuse abuse.

Yes SS do sometimes get it wrong.

In both directions.

In the late 80s early 90s there were panics about satanic child abuse and whole groups of parents were accused of satanic child abuse which almost certainly didn't happen.

See also the many children who are ill/have brittle bone disease/etc where SS suspect munchausens by proxy.

The Netflix film looking after Maya is about exactly this situation in the US. The dad (mum killed herself after the allegations and being separated from her daughter) is now suing everyone involved

I imagine they occationaly get it wrong when they remove children, but the numbers where this apply are tiny. There are probably a great many more families with genuine reasons for concern, but who could have been supported to stay together if the resources were available. But because social workers are stretched so thin, instead of become involved when a family is struggling but could still turn it around, families are left to fail until they are at crisis point, by which time it's nearly impossible to resolve.

I've worked alongside ss in child protection for many years although I'm not a sw myself. I've seen sw display bias towards people of different ethnic backgrounds, and I guess where individual standards of care where one person might feel is neglectful and another may see it as just less than ideal. I've only seen one case where children were removed because a parent was perceived to be under the influence but was actually having a side effect to properly prescribed and appropriately taken medication. But in the former instances children were never removed, and in the latter the parents social worker had resolved the matter by lunchtime the following day and the children were back home. Sw are not infallible, there's a certain amount of gut instinct and judgement that goes into doing the job just by its nature but in the overwhelming majority of cases I've witnessed, the children have been removed amidst genuine concern and I've been able to see the sw perspective even though the parent felt very differently about it.

At the end of the day, sw have to work first and foremost to help maintain a family through support, resource and education. If there's a significant risk to the child that means the child is unsafe at home then they will need to be removed and a sw will need to have this argued before a court that it's in the best interests of the child to be taken into care considering the trauma of being removed from their parent and their home. At risk management conferences there's a table of professionals who work with the family who need to vote on whether or not they feel the child can safely stay at home so they can outvote the sw though I've never seen that happen because the sw needs to outline their reasoning.

So for me, to get to the point of actually removing a child - there needs to be enough of a concern to merit it otherwise the sw will be turned down in their request. And I guess with the nature of the job it is best they err on the side of caution. The consequences of missing something and being too lenient can be catastrophic as we all know.

I will say though that it can be especially difficult for parents who have already had a child removed- it's such a traumatic thing to have to go through and it makes complete sense to me why you'd want to fight tooth and nail (and might then be secretive) to keep your children with you. I can't think of anything worse than being separated from my little boy.

I also think the cases that are really especially ethically difficult are ones involving domestic abuse where a lot of pressure is put on a woman to leave an abusive partner, but we know that that can actually make it even more dangerous for her to make that move. So in a sense it's damned if you do damned if you don't.

For me the entire system needs a massive overhaul to be honest. I'd like to see caretaking roles come in to replace say adoption (more like long term fostering) so a child can very much be part of a family without severing their links to their biological family until they're old enough to decide if that's something they want for themselves. I think it might give people more time to get their lives in better shape as well. I've worked with women who have had their baby removed reasonably quickly (for drug and dv related reasons) and that child was immediately moved towards adoption (the system is geared to move younger children in that direction faster due to them being more likely to being adopted and this being seen as the ideal outcome)

By the time the child was adopted that mum was sober and had managed to safely leave the relationship but then had no legal rights to get her child back. Which had been her motivation all along. It did make me wonder what would have happened if she'd been given more time but the system was stacked against her. A slightly older child would have been in care for longer and probably would have been returned to her.

In the UK the threshold for removal is very high, our childrens birth mum is a very vocal voice on these sites, she appears to be well put together, caring etc, in reality both of our children would be dead if they had been left in her care.

^this all day long.

The resources just aren't there and the service is being chronically under funded so early intervention work is really hard to do now which is a failing to those families but not the fault of the sw.

As a social worker, yes, sometimes we make calls that in hindsight may not be the best outcomes for children. However when it comes to permanent removal of children it's really unlikely that 'miscarriages of justice' happen. You have 4 barristers in court usually, sometimes more if there are more than 2 parents in a case, or if the child has their own legal representation. You have a court guardian and magistrates or a judge. You have expert witnesses and assessments completed. It's simply not the case that children are permanently removed on the basis of social workers' reports. Impossible.
Listening to Constance Marten's level of delusion about her parenting capacity in her evidence should demonstrate the level of denial and self delusion that some parents have relating to the care of their children.

@Lavender14
I've worked with women who have had their baby removed reasonably quickly (for drug and dv related reasons) and that child was immediately moved towards adoption (the system is geared to move younger children in that direction faster due to them being more likely to being adopted and this being seen as the ideal outcome) By the time the child was adopted that mum was sober and had managed to safely leave the relationship but then had no legal rights to get her child back. Which had been her motivation all along. It did make me wonder what would have happened if she'd been given more time but the system was stacked against her. A slightly older child would have been in care for longer and probably would have been returned to her.

this isn't true. Care proceedings have timescales regardless of the age of the child. All care proceedings should aim to conclude within 26 weeks whether it's a newborn or a 14 year old. However you're right that children are moved towards adoption care plans relatively quickly where adoption is a possible outcome, because all evidence shows that they do better when adopted younger and spending less time in foster care. The woman you refer to must have made pretty much no progress at all during the 26 weeks, as if she had been making progress she would have been able to successfully challenge the final care plan and proceedings would have been extended. I've done care proceedings where that's happened. Either the guardian has challenged the adoption care plan or the LA agency decision maker hasn't approved the adoption care plan in the first place. If there is doubt that 'nothing else will do' then adoption won't be approved. However older children also need permanence just as much as babies do. They are no more ok to languish in limbo than babies are - but parents do have the option to apply to discharge a care order later in their childhood whereas they don't when a child is adopted, so you are correct on that.

See also, for example

amp.theguardian.com/society/2017/jul/28/council-apologises-over-unlawful-removal-of-child-from-mother

(This one is US and is famous largely because the family are rich and while the local equivalent of SS believed it was munchausens by proxy they believed she was ill, there have been a number of lawsuits over this. The child was in hospital and continued to be ill despite being removed from her family and not allowed to see them. )

people.com/take-care-of-maya-munchausen-by-proxy-accusation-maya-kowalski-mom-death-by-suicide-7509016

The satanic child abuse removals are obviously not recent, being late 80s early 90s, but more information here is case you are interested.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clevelandchilddabusescandal

Mistakes happen. If someone sincerely believes a child is being hurt or harmed then they are right to step in, but I acknowledge it doesn’t make it any less traumatic for the children and the parents.

The more problematic ones are the ones where it is ‘might’, ‘could’, especially when it’s due to domestic violence.

I wish they had been involved in my life as a child. I have been told by an adult social worker that in the 90s, my mum's well paid and high responsibility job had protected her despite school concerns.

Do you think that’s no longer true?

Do you think many children are taken into care in affluent areas compared to ones mired in poverty?

There clearly are cases where social services get it wrong - occasionally they pop up in the papers where the child has a rare illness which causes symptoms that are blamed on the parents. But the point of permanent removal is at the end of a long process, the vast majority of cases are clear.

I have been tangentially professionally involved with some of the people you’re talking about. Honestly, as soon as you scratch the surface you see the glaringly obvious reason that they were under social services, or had a previous child removed. By hiding they then make themselves even more vulnerable.

I don’t know whether it’s still in operation, but there was a particular route which was once well trodden by these families “escaping” from social services. To a fairly close country unreachable by UK law enforcement. There was a particular individual who funded desperate single mothers and their young children to get there. He was very rich. Let’s just say it was not done out of the goodness of his heart.

I know of people like that but I also know people who have been targeted by a SW due to their perceived social class and/or ethnicity.

The SW decides that a child is being abused when other parties if they bothered asking would show this isn't true. Some of the cases where SW have made allegations are absolutely ridiculous.

I've got family members and close friends who work or have worked in paediatric healthcare who have had to help prove or disprove claims of abuse.

Anyway judges are more likely to listen to third parties like doctors rather than social workers as some LA's SS are known to be a complete mess and provide unreliable statements.

There is this case

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65428918

Interesting read. Thank you.

Thanks for all these responses, very insightful. I’d like to say to those who work in this field I just don’t know how you do it. It must be one of the hardest jibs in the world.

I’d forgotten about the satanic panic era. A fascinating bit of social history which I suppose does prove abuse can be fabricated. Presumably the system now wouldn’t allow it to happen as it’s far more case by case. We must remember too that some people had their lives ruined by the accusations. I remember listening to an interview with a nursery worker.

Also very interesting re. Ethnicity/social class factors. Does anyone actually keep stats because the courts are secret?

TimesChangeAgain sadly that route you speak of appears very much still in operation. It was mentioned in the current trial (I’m listening to the podcast of the court reports and I think it’s fine to stick to mentioning facts on here). It screams red flags to me!

I know an ongoing case where the parents are ademant that SS took their DC out of spite.... and you'd probably believe the parents at first sight.

I know the parents through work ( we cross paths on a regular, work related basis- nothing to do with SS.)
The problem is, they have a very chaotic life that's not suitable for children. There is a serious MH diagnosis, but no willingness to get better or take medication.

DC often miss school or get shipped out to friends (not family) late at night - even I was once asked to help out...
SS have tried to get them some help and structure to no avail.

In the end, they took the DC, had one emergency court hearing and have been in care since.

I don't know the ins and outs, only what said colleague wants me to know.

But I don't believe SS have done anything wrong.

I don't think SS have time or resources to just take any child away from their parents without reason to do so.

I don't think SS have time or resources to just take any child away from their parents without reason to do so.

Absolutely this. I think the chances of children being removed are vanishingly small. It takes so much more than you might think to even get close to removing children.

There have been mistakes like the scandal of children with Brittle bone disease who were snatched away from.their parents and adopted away from their totally innocent parents.
And then the Cleveland child abuse scandal were innocent parents (100s of them) were wrongly accused of child sex abuse.
The other side of the coin being cases like Baby P whose mother smeared his face with chocolate to fool social workers he wasn't covered in bruises.......

^
Ex CP social worker
I can speak from my perspective of U.K. social work only but social workers definitely aren't out to remove loads of kids - it's incredibly distressing for the child/family and us. It's a high stress job already why would we make additional upset just because. It's a mega high threshold for removal with a lot of evidence needed - generally when kids are removed it's for their genuine safety and care.