I don't understand all the anxiety about SWs

[Loveweekends10]

I see so many threads on here where people are anxious about social workers. I really don't get it. I can honestly say that before I came on mumsnet I never gave them a second thought.
Is this anxiety whipped up by the media? Is it low confidence in some parents that they don't think they are dong a good enough job with their kids?
I'm also shocked about the amount of people that say they fell out with someone and that person then rang social services to get at them.

There is no way that I would agree to the short term foster placement.

I don't know how true or untrue anyones claims are. I have no experience of SWs or SS at all to base my own opinions on. I like to believe that an organisation like that would make no mistakes, but everyone knows that isnt the case, so the question is to what extent?
Therefore I am vaguely wary of them (in a fear of the unknown kind of way), but it is hardly a fear that is affecting my day to day life.

However, I will admit to feigning a fear of having DSs taken off me if anyone suggests taking them in cars without carseats, for example. A quicker and easier way to justify my paranoid or perfectly reasonable to most people! parenting choices to an older generation

about the case where a young couple had a son. baby was 2 weeks old then baby was taken ill at home. both parents took the child to hospital where the child was found to have a broken arm.. and a fractured skull.

obiousely doctors infomred ss, the parents where charged but denided.

all fair enough. the baby died while both where in jail. they where put on baill pending the court date.

there was tests done, parents both still denided hurting the child. it came out that the baby had rickiets. becasue the mum was very low her self. it was no ones faults.

this isnt where i have issue with. during this they had convieved again. the child was taken of then 2 days after the birth. and even though it was proved that their first child died through no fault of thiers they had to fight tooth and nial in court to get that child back.

could explain that?

Having a dysfunctional relationship with your - and here's the key word - adoptive patents, who are seen by SS as being Angels no doubt, is not enough reason to take somebody's child away from them. If my parents made that call that would have no doubt been treated like the crank callers these people were.

I've never been worried about social serices, and from my professional experience of them they are very slow to take kids into care, often too slow in my opinion and some kids are left with alcoholic/ drug addict/ neglectful parents with violent boyfriends for too long.
There isn't the money for them to whip every kid into care and inadequate parents are given endless chances.
If women don't drink excessively, don't get high on heroin neglecting their kids in search of their next kick, don't persistently invite violent thugs into their children's home and love and look after their kids then social workers won't be interested. They aren't zombies out their to hurt mothers, they are trying to protect vulnerable children.
There are some seriously crap parents out there.
I would be worried if social workers didn't exist.

I am another one who has spent most of my childresn lives worried about social services, dd1 didnt put weight on, I took her to hospital at a few weeks old as she was vomitting and they wouldnt let us go home as they 'wanted to check I was feeding her' she got weighed at least weekly and had fail to thrive written in her red book. I wrote down every feed, how long, which boob.

This paranoia has continuted until very recently, she has a few behaviour problems and I asked for help at school as we had no idea what to do, again I was paranoid that someone is going to take her.

It os only now that I am doing training to help vunerable families that I realise how damaging this fear has been to mine and dd's relationship.

All because she didnt put weight on (she was lactose, soya and gluten intolerant these thigns were never suggested, we just got weighed, tutted at and told I was negleting her).
She is 9 and I am going to get back my relationship with her, I always believed that I had to do exactly as proffesionals told me or she would be taken away, I hve never asserted any control over the decisions we made regarding her welfare.

I do worry about ss becomiing involved in our lives- not because of any of our family's behaviours or action- but because I see daily the result of many, many poor decisions made by SWs. Thankfully that is counterbalanced by seeing the results of good decisions made by sws on children's lives, but I have no faith in the system (as it were) and its ability to protect (the right) children. Ii say this as a professional that works with children, and has done for over 20 years.

Rickets does not give you a fractured skull. You do not get rickets because your mother is"low in herself"

Wondering, rickets is an easily preventable disease, I'm amazed that the mother's AN care didn't pick it up. So it makes me wonder whether they were concerned about neglect and failure to thrive in the second child.
Unless you have a lot more detail about the circumstances, and why the second child was removed, it is impossible to theorise.

My experience chimes with 2rebecca's.

I would also say that I have met two social workers- one when I was a child. She was nice and wrote accurate reports. (Unlike someone in an associated field who was extremely incompetent with reports, so I'm willing to believe that does happen amongst social workers.) And a social worker attached to a hospital special care unit, who came out to check on parents after they took their babies home. She was also lovely. (She even offered to pick up shopping for us.)

The system is appalling.
Can you imagine your rosie cheeked children being taken from their marks and Spencer's tv advert life and put into foster care for even a short while with shite food their mother wouldn't dream of feeding them, other angry, rough children who are used to nobody caring about them and are defensive and aggressive as a result ?
Oh and then when you see your mum she has to pretend everything is ok otherwise her next visit is cancelled ? Luckily it never came to that for my friend but she was in bits for 12 hours imagining the worst case, and I'll say again she did not agree to FC but that's where he went.

I am a foster carer and my personal experience is generally that SW's will only ever remove a child as a very last resort.

All of our preparation training and ongoing training tells us that children develop best when with their families and SS in our area give a huge amount of support to birth parents offering them parenting classes, counselling, ongoing assessments etc to try and keep the child at home. In the case of our current placement they left the child far too long with his mother in the hope they could support and encourage her to change which sadly she couldn't. This resulted in a huge amount of trauma for the child and ongoing problems which are likely to continue for the rest of his life.

I have met a few very good social workers and some bad ones but I don't believe they snatch children and I think if people had any comprehension of the amount of children at risk in our society they would maybe not be so quick to judge what social workers do.

Having said that I think there is some bad practice and a lot of bad management of (limited) budgets and as in any profession there will always be those who are ruthless and only interested in their own career progression at the expense of all else.

The real trouble is they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they don't act as in the Baby P case they are quite rightly vilified and if they do they are deemed child snatchers. I honestly don't think any caring loving parent who puts their child first is going to be at risk of having their children removed as a result of a malicious call but I do think that SS are duty bound to investigate that call. It is sometimes very hard being a foster carer but I really wouldn't want to be a social worker on the looked after child team.

The thing about the internet is that people use it to air extremes of view and experience, or to talk about stories of extreme experiences.

So tripadvisor is full of reviews from people who either loved or hated the hotel they stayed at and not many from people who thought it was ok but nothing special.

Similarly, people who have had horrific experiences with social services post about those experiences. People who have had brief encounters with social services that all turned out ok in the end tend not to post about them.

That is not to say that social services never get it wrong. I know someone (know them personally and know exactly what happened - this isn't "friend of a friend of a friend stuff") who had social services threatening to remove their children due to a huge misunderstanding about a medical situation. It was the most surreal, nightmarish situation because it seemed that every time they produced evidence, the SW involved would imediately move the goalpoasts, and every time they agreed to something the SW wanted, she would turn round and say "actually, that's still not going to be enough". It was completely incomprehensible. They finished up leaving the country and going home - they were from another EU country whose social services equivalent have assessed them and discharged them with no concerns whatsoever.

But set against that, I know (through work) of a vast number of families who have had social services involvement that was entirely right and proper and resolved in the appropriate manner. But you don't hear about those. People don't come on the internet and say "actually, my children weren't being looked after properly because I was drinking a bit too much, or involved with someone violent. Social services made me sort myself out and now things are better."

And unfortunately, an awful lot of people post social services horror stories on places like MN, and they simply aren't true. Even if a social worker gets it wrong, they still have to go through the proper channels to get it wrong. They can't just walk into a house, pick up a baby and walk back into their office and say "look at this nice adoptable baby I stole today". There has to be a court order or a PPO. There will be paperwork. There will be other people involved. If someone comes on MN with a story about a rogue SW strolling into their house and removing their baby with no warning or explanation then they simply aren't telling the truth, I'm afraid.

What also rings alarm bells is when they then claim that no-one is doing anything at all - their solicitor seems powerless, the court doesn't seem inclined to have a hearing, social services won't give them any information etc. The amount of work involved in removing a child from its birth family is huge. There are vast quantities of paperwork, multiple professionals involved, all sorts of court reports and witness statements. Social workers can't just take children away because they feel like it.

And you also have to remember that the confidentiality issue involved in these proceedings means that the Daily Mail isn't actually invited to the court hearing to see why a child is being removed - it is going on what it is told, generally by people who have a pretty vested interest in their version of events being put forward.

Social services sometimes get it wrong. But there are all sorts of safeguards in the legal system to make sure that those mistakes are rectified. The cases where the mistake gets carried through and manages to get past the court/lawyers/cafcass have to be vanishingly small, but account for a very large proportion of the stuff that is posted on the internet.

I've never been worried about them either

My experience of them (foster carer) has also been the same as 2Rebecca's

wonderingsoul do you have evidence to back that up, because again that's ONE side.

My children used to have quite a lot of bruises.
Some of them were because of football/rough and tumble/playing sports with their friends.
But I used to be a bit concerned.
Turns out,I found out later,their asthma medicine was causing extra bruises.
But I didnt know that at the time.

On the other hand,I have done many years of voluntary work which involved social workers. Also, my DH and I have fostered.
Most social workers are lovely imo,working very hard, with far too many cases,and dont have time to process the emotional impact on themselves with the cases they deal with. And trying their very best in quite frabkly,trying circumstances.
But there was 1 social worker I met who I wouldnt have trusted.
Just the 1 out of many.
And unfortunately,that 1 would have had the potential to do damage if she had a mind too. I dont know if she did,and I presume she had bosses,who I hope would have kept everything in check, but I would not have wanted to have been one of her cases.

She was told if she allowed the child to be returned to the grandparents and reported to the police station the next morning she could go home with her partner

You definitely don't know th full story. I have fs.ily visiting this morning one of whom has read this (he lives aibu) and was in the police over 30 years he is sceptical surprised this would happen.
Since a court agreed the removal on the basis it was kidnapping it wouldn't be down to the discretion of the officer to decide when and if to arresst the mother.

That should say family visiting.

I'm sorry mutny but there's no other explanation other than my friends and nothing else would add up. If she had kidnapped him she wouldn't have had him returned to her so quickly which I did see happen with my own eyes. The sort of person she is if there had been concerns from SS or the grandparents she wouldn't have kept them to herself we would have all known the gory details as we did as this "issue" continued. Bottom line was that her parents didn't like her new partner who became her husband, didn't like her moving area and so played SS like a fiddle.

I doubt the court did agree to the rwmocal on the basis of kidnapping that was the bloody point my friend handed him over to go to the grandparents to avoid upsetting the child. He should never have gone to FC

The moral of the story is make sure that you always get on well with your parents! It should never have happened. There must be a huge back history.

So, the grandparents made a malicious complaint, and it's a problem that social services didn't take the child to the people who made the malicious complaint?

I happen to have experience of that kind of person in my own family, and your story is reassuring me that social services procedures are sensible!

My experience of them is the same as yours kungfupanda. Loads of work goes into gathering evidence in order to have enough to justify a judge ordering a child's removal. In many cases it takes years....especially of the concerns are low grade but significant. I have gone to meetings in schools when there have been concerns about a child going back to almost babyhood....and there are usually younger brothers and sisters too. Finally enough evidence is gathered that the parents or parent simply cannot make the changes needed and it gets to court.

There are also families who work with SS and get to the point of case closed....a few months or a year goes by and then the concerns rise again, SS get involved again and do the same work, the parent gets parenting assessments and support, things improve, case gets closed. The a year down the line it starts again......some families will never maintain their positive changes.

I lived next door to a neighbour from hell who was openly drug dealing. She had four children....
one in his 20s living with a woman of 35...they had three children and constant SS involvement due to police concerns when they raided the flat for drugs,
an 18 year old who was dragged out by police one morning and charged with burglary, car theft etc, (I won't mention the 18 year old's 16 yr. old friend who neighbour from hell was apparently "fostering"....which involved sleeping with him).
a 14 year old who barely went to school ....and last I heard was pregnant.
and a 3 year old who she screamed at on a regular basis. The 3 year old was regularly bought back by police after he had managed to escape the flat. I contacted SS myself one day when I observed him by the busy road with her screaming from the balcony "Fucking well get back up ere". Thankfully a car stopped, the "mother" then went down and actually said "I fucking well told you to come in" to which the three year old replied "you fuck off"!

It quickly became apparent that this was one of those families which had been given loads of input over the years by SS to no avail...all the older children were failed and failing in life. The only one with a chance was the three year old and finally after yet another year of work SS went to court and he was removed. He has a chance now.....shame that it didn't happen for any of his siblings.

SW? I wouldn't want to do their job for all the money in the world.

Mrs DeVere, the one 1 met that I talked about was exactly how you described her in the 2nd and 3rd paragraph.

hopperty, I was told by people who work in sw, that when there is a big profile case like baby P,they are advised and presumably trained, in a certain way,to be more vigilant etc, so they tend to go one way.
When the next big case comes along in the media,which it will,with a child taken away that in no way should have done, then the training etc goes the other way,and children will be left with unsafe parents that should not have been left.
They can swing one way,and then a few years later,overdo it the other way.