To wonder if middle class families are ever referred to ss?

[malificent7]

It always seem to be the poor who are referred but middle class naice families can be abusive too.
My family was middle class but my mum had severe mental health issues which affected her parenting (a lot). I gave a few friends who had wealthy parents but were treated very badly.. aibu to wonder if wealth covers up bad situations?

A single parent i saw on twitter was left without heating for over a week and was tweeting photos of her kids wrapped in blankets on the sofa looking cold and upset.

A bloke who worked as a gas engineer tweeted at her "Stop pinching your kids to make them cry"

Shes a social housing tenant.

This smacked of classism to me because an mc parent who owns their own house wouldnt be having to tweet to get their landlord to come and do a repair.

So this single parent was basically being accused of child abuse when she was simply sticking up for her kids.

So being lower down the socio economic scale may well make someone more likely to be the victim of a baseless accusation.

I've just remembered, I was referred to as as a child. I was very small so don't remember it at all, but they were concerned about the number of injuries my siblings and I had that needed medical attention. Both my parents were teachers so we were pretty middle class, and they were friends with the doctors who actually referred us. There wasn't much involvement because there was evidence that we were just very clumsy/accident prone kids, most of the injuries happened when we were at school/playgroup so my parents and our teachers were interviewed and no further involvement.

Brad Pitt was certainly interviewed by SS because of how he treated his son.
But the difference with celebrities is that most will have full time nannies who will actually do the care.
Reminds me of John Lennon who supposedly was a SAHD. In reality he spent most of the time in bed drugged up to the eyeballs, and paid staff took care of his son. If he had been poor, his son would have been very neglected and taken into care.

I'd be surprised if Kate moss or poor peaches geldof hadn't had some involvement TBH. Probably a lot more too. I am aware of a couple of very minor celebs who have had SW involvement but obviously wouldn't ever tell anyone. We have very strict procedures in place for data protection.

and how do you know that Brasty?
Have u met Sean Lennon?

Am a total middle-class cliche and was referred because teenage daughter was reported for indulging in risky behaviour that we were not aware of. Some of the issues raised were justified, some were demonstrably untrue. The difference was that as an articulate middle class parent, I was able to talk them down with just a couple of phone calls. They didn't visit. I found them very helpful actually but am well aware that had I not been so naicely spoken with all the relevant reassuring vocabulary to hand, it might have been a much longer involvement.

I work in a very expensive prep school and yes we do still have to make as referrals and probably more regularly than you may think.

Funnily enough an uber mc mother crashed her car into the back of my neighbour's house in August 2009 and I witnessed the prang. She was hugely stressed and I could hear a child sobbing from inside the car (which was driveable and had been reversed into a bus stop). Then the door opened and a four year old got out and said to me 'Look what Mummy's done, look what Mummy's done'. Huge pinches all down her arm. I met the same mother four weeks later socially. Turned out she was a GP and the father a doctor too. They were both very embarrassed to see me and just tried to wheel the conversation onto secondary schools.... I suppose she refers other families though. Those were serious marks on the little girls arm.

I would assume that they do get referred, prob not at the same rate and i would also think the kids are less likely to be removed from middle class and upperclass families. But thats just my own observation from friends who have had ss dealings and also cases publicised in media.

In fairness, I don't think it's any different to any other time where public sector workers encounter members of the general public, but I suppose where SS are concerned they tend to cross over the main public sectors - healthcare and education and police - and also because their powers are so very, well, powerful.

One of the major triggers for altering SS seems to be domestic abuse. Domestic violence (which isn't just physical) is of course something transcending all intelligence markers and levels of income, but I wonder if a middle class man might be less likely to abuse his wife by actually striking her, or throwing her down the stairs or similar? (Please note that I said 'less likely', not 'impossible.') I often think one of the things that if we could see it, would be a neon light for someone aggressive is poor literacy skills - a lack of ability to express themselves through words (whether spoken or written) and that is more likely to come out physically.

Sexual abuse too: is it more likely that a middle class man with inclinations in that direction would pay to download pornography or even (ugh) take a trip abroad? Just speculating here.

Finally, I suppose it is just an outlook, a sense of what is acceptable and what isn't. Child running round the fields and picking vegetables and getting muddy then drawing pictures = good; child charging around the local estates with abandoned shopping trolleys and spraying graffiti = bad.

Fuck me goodbye did you report them for child abuse? The little 4 year old was pinched all down her arm?!

No I didn't lassie. The father wasn't in the car at the time. The mother was on her own. In fact part of the problem seemed to be that the father had stayed on the beach with friends while the mother had to go home to make tea that had made her so cross. But I can't work out whether she crashed the car because she was pinching the little girl or whether she pinched her because she crashed the car. It was a surreal day because my father had died that morning and the mother told me the thing about the father on the beach and then said that she was upset because she'd had to put her horse down that morning too. So as you can see from my point of view extremely surreal. In fact it turned out that the little girl was in a class below my own DD at primary school, and I met the parents at the September harvest festival tea. I don't think the story can get more middle class but I haven't elaborated a single detail. August 9th 2009. I probably should have reported this GP but it seemed like a single meltdown. The little girl seemed fine when I saw her that September at school. I just don't like the fact that the mother judges others - but perhaps she doesn't.

I'm not middle-class, but I do for some reason come across very well and my accent is considered quite poshe for the area.

I reckon if it wasn't for that, the SW that came out to visit after 2-week-old DS had a bump to the head which required a trip to a&e, wouldn't have been so satisfied with us.

Of course it was a total accident and I was a first-time mum, absolutely terrified and devastated my baby had been injured, so at the time her comments about being 'pleasantly surprised' and pleased because 'she didn't often speak to parents like us on a daily basis' didn't really register until after I'd had time to ponder them.

I almost chopped the end off my 1 year old's finger in a door (by accident - it was absolutely dreadful for me. I remember it 20 years later) but luckily A&E could stick it back on again. No report to social services but it was a one off accident - genuine accident. His father took him to A&E as I was at home waiting for a home visit (only one we ever asked for ) from our GP for a very sick other child. Not a good day.

I think people can pay to cover things up, have nannies etc. Think about the Rausing couple (very rich, mother died and she and her husband both had been addicted very badly to drugs, body of mother left by husband or ex husband in the large London house for 30 days whilst he took drugs). All the press reports were about the sentencing of the father (he got off pretty lightly) for not reporting a death immediately but I kept thinking about the children.

Ah looked it up again.... 8 weeks covered up her death. It was Eva Rausing who died www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2248047/Eva-Rausing-death-Billionaire-Tetra-Pak-heir-tells-inquest-hid-wifes-body-12-layers-clothes.html
He's remarried www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2637897/The-Tetra-Pak-billionaire-hid-drug-addict-wifes-body-new-love-marry-bitter-family-rift.html

Definitely middle class here, were referred repeatedly by dd's school (attendance issues). Agree with Ubiquity that you get into a mindset of constantly second-guessing everything you do.

Our first encounter with suspicion was when dd was 7 or 8 and we were suspected of abuse by the hospital- the last attempt was to report her by the school was when she was 10 or 11. But it took many, many years for us to stop looking over our shoulders. Dd is in her twenties now, but still has to steel herself to make a doctor's appointment.

Enormous Tiger - none of those reports referred to any children being in the house ...

I don't think the Rausing's children had lived with them for quite a while. Whether that's because parents asked for help taking care of them, if family intervened or because of social care involvement quite rightly isn't public knowledge.

My other half works in middle class school. Lots of SS involvement for domestic violence, sexual abuse, neglect etc etc. Middle class parents may find it easier to keep that more private.

Someone up thread mentioned that if a sw was involved in a child's childhood it would flag them in parenthood, I would have thought that to be true, however, when I was reaching out for help from a duty social worker to help with my then undiagnosed son with adhd, I was told that as I was maintaining reasonable verbal communication with him, (I had asked him to go back downstairs as I was on the phone) they wouldn't be able to help. I at the time ticked all the boxes, child with behavioural problems including multiple exclusions from school...at 7yrs old, single mother of 2, HA house on rough council estate, unemployed, mild mh issues, and "ss" involvement as a child. And yet, I have never had a social worker in my home.

Social work involvement as a child doesn't 'flag' anything. If a referral is made then SWs will check parent's background if known to them but it won't come to their attention unless there is a trigger event.

A MC member of DH's extended family had SS involvement.

The family member was working abroad and commuting weekly. He didn't realise that his wife was an alcoholic, and possibly also an addict. (Not sure of full details.) She collapsed one day on the school run, and it all came out.

I'm not sure of what SS involvement they had, but she was deemed unsuitable to be the main carer of the children, and he left his job to take over. They are divorced now, and the children live with him.

Scutt and Poldarks :

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. I don't think my friend was saying that social work involvement as a child was a formal trigger. Just that it was one of the ways people tended to get on their radar.
So, for example, if social work are already involved with a family and one of the older teens or adult children has a baby- they will probably open a file.
She said that in her LA, it almost runs in families.
The context of the conversation was actually about how working class people tend to have more social work involvement. My friend (who is a social worker) thinks this is the case and was quite critical of it.
She was saying that working class people may not have more problems- but that the problems they do have are more visible.
In addition to maybe already beign on the social work radar she also mentioned: living in greater proximity to others so parenting behaviour and domestic violence are more noticible to neighbours; also that health and educational professionals might be more likely to view problematic behavoiur as a safeguarding issue if the client is working class.

I know of a very middle class family (distant relatives on the in-laws side) that have had 2 children removed by SS. Not entirely sure of reason, we only get the family's PoV that it's all a big mistake. But yes, it does happen.