The reality is that when anyone cites a case of miscarriage of justice, the same very few cases come up time and again: but the courts are dealing with these cases day after day, and the fact that the vast majority of cases go through without attracting publicity does rather suggest that they are simply doing their jobs properly
I am a bit of a fan of childrens services, I lurk on a lot of these threads challenging the whole baby snatcher thing I despise JH and his merry band of cheerleaders and I think they spout a huge amount of nonsence, I have previously spent a great deal of time working as a CP SW before I left the LA to go in a connected but different direction.
But I do think it is a little disturbing to say that because it's rare its not worthy of discussion.
I have over the years been horrified by behaviour of some professionals in the course of their jobs and I have also just been concerned . SW are just human beings like everybody else they all bring their own stuff into their practises and opinions and day to day work just like everybody else.
You get brilliant ones shockingly bad ones and every single thing in between just like all other people.
Ive sat in threshold meetings and questioned how a meeting a SW is referring to and an incident during it bares no resemblance to the very same meeting I attended (and unusually recorded with consent) ive had social workers sit at a desk and write up their notes with something like half an hour before they are needed and when they relate to incidents that happened and contacts that happened a year ago and the notes are not that great ive seen care order files that are in essence just the same report regurgitated over and over again making a file look huge.
Ive seen social workers from exactly the same team witness an event and view it totally differently (the one I'm thinking of was quite an extreme difference one was very possitive and one was incredibly negative) ive known SW who have refused to provide minutes within a timely fashion and who comunicate in ways that even other professionals cant work out.
Granted the overwhelming majority of SW that I have worked with over the years are mostly ok but the same as everything you do get shit ones.
It's all fine and well to say the court is there to protect us from miscarriages and all that jaz and on the whole they do well (I am a huge fan of the court system) but that process is not as straight forward as you would often think.
A,good example I can think of that is not unusual, familiy obtain a Solisitor because they are going through the court system, they never see the same one twice, the people that show up for court have not even had time to fully read the file and have little to no grasp of the real situation. The case I'm thinking of ended up in the judge making clear that the parent was correct the LA were not but by the time that happened the damage had already been done and a care order happened for a child that would not have been needed if the LA had not been so stuck on their original view point. The parent im thinking of after over a year of action was loving and able enough to realise that due to the agency failure one of the children's life situation had changed sufficiently enough to mean that should she keep fighting she would be doing damage so she stopped, she was hugely commended by the judge and was told that she had dealt with the situation in her childs best interests and that should the matter have been dealt with correctly by the LA initially then it would not have needed to happen.
Blind faith in a system IMO is not wise especially when the system that had been funding it has been made harder to access and budgets are more Important than the system itself.