To think that 'middle class' parents get away with murder

[catfunk]

I grew up in a beautiful but modest part of the north with a fair amount of poverty and unemployment. Lots of families were under social services' care (?) police called out a lot, etc.

I now live in a fairly expensive city in the south, a fairly left wing liberal place where people party, lots of mums are 'trendy' types and generational wealth is quite common.

It struck me the other day that if the parents in my home town behaved like the parents in my current home there'd be real repercussions.
Noisy house parties whilst kids are in bed upstairs, parents getting drunk and staying out all night, recreational drug taking and being too hungover to do the school run. But it's ok because they're drinking champagne and expensive gin instead of tenants, and expensive cannabis tinctures instead of smoking resin?

None of the kids seem unhappy or affected and they do have lovely family times together of course but AIBU To think this is not fair ?

I also don't mean that ALL MC folk behave like this, maybe my op was badly worded. I mean the MC parents who do behave like this sort of wear it as a badge of honour and don't feel the need to hide it which I find quite surprising sometimes.

I agree with you. I basically ditched my middle class lifestyle (new found) because I could not tolerate drug taking with young children. Totally. Fucking. Irresponsible. Also Brighton crowd.

When I saw the pictures of Whitney Houston home her drug paraphernalia I thought her daughter would be removed to safety. She wasn't so both died. It was so shocking.

www.thesun.co.uk/news/369700/100million-diva-whitney-houston-blew-fortune-on-crack/amp/

I wouldn't say middle class rather monied class

I have a friend with alcoholic parents who often took lumps out of each other, they were at best neglectful and at worse abusive if she got in thr way of their drink. Drug use, weekends away without their kids being supervised from being around 10, no food in the house, occasional physical abuse on the kids .
The police were regularly called due to the constant violence between parents, at no point was anything done, their parenting was never questioned, even when my friend stole food, had no clean or well fitting clothes, the parents were extremely well put together, highly professional individuals and my friend always says they'd have got away with murdering their kids.

I completely agree. Time and time again my mc friends say things / admit to things that I know Id be judged very harshly for. They laugh it off and have zero repecussions.

@catfunk

Yes wowzaa to all of the above.

So for example friends kid's teacher caught her at the gate on a Monday eve recently to ask are you ok, child says you were sick all day yesterday so dad took them out for the day. Mum says 'oh yes just drank too much on Saturday night as usual' and they all laughed.

How dare a father actually parent! The horror

I work with children who often have support from the state in the form of social workers or family support workers, Ed Psych’s and mental health teams etc.
I often think the amount of money spent on professionals who seem to have endless meeting to chat about what’s happening would be better spent just giving families a min wage Au Pair for a year. Like a MC family. Practical help with the house, someone to talk to and child centred support with the kids would be really helpful.

Sounds great in theory- however families need to be empowered to parent themselves, not have someone do it for them.

Yes. But support, an outsider in the house so behaviour is watched and another pair of hands could help in 90% of cases. They would still be the parents. Probably best as an early intervention - hard to get someone into a house once things have completely deteriorated.

If it works, far less traumatic for the children.

I'm thinking there wouldn't be space for a live in Aupair so they would actually be doing something similar to the old family support workers.
They were great as was surestart and family centers.

You won't find SW's disagreeing with their value.

I was just about to say Family Support workers do similar but don’t stay over or all day. Thing is it only works for so long and parents have to make progress and pick up the reins themselves at some point.

@MinesAPintOfTea - as if an abusive parent would accept a stranger not of their choosing to enter their household to “spy on them for social services.” Not the same thing at all as a wealthy parent outsourcing to someone they do not expect to report on them to social services in the first place.

IMO if you take drugs you’re a chav, even if it’s cocaine and you went to Eton

We were “middle class” for my village when I was growing up and so nobody, not even teachers seemed to clock our neglect and an extremely stressful home life with domestic abuse. I barely remember what we ate when I was a kid, except for cheap freezer stuff and junk like crisps, we weren’t kept clean (this was actually brought up when I went to secondary school, but I got the odd comment at primary school about smelling, etc), we were anxious and had signs of ptsd which in my case manifested in difficulties at school. We wore patchy old clothes and frequently got detentions for missed homework etc. My parents were both well spoken professionals though and nobody put it together. I remember going to the homes of the more “working class” kids my parents sneered at and just being amazed at how nurturing their parents could be or how warm and secure their environments. There is 100% a class bias and I really hope people are more aware of this now in school settings etc. I suffer to this day with childhood trauma and I only realised how bad it was for us when I became a mum myself.

Sadly, plenty of abused, poor children slip through the net, too. It’s not the sole preserve of the middle classes to get away with neglect and abuse.

@LovePoppy clearly not the point but ok

You are absolutely right

I work in a child protection arena and it's true that many professionals will be getting drunk, sniffing coke etc but if my clients did that we'd be going down a whole different route

You sound like a judgemental scold !
How do you know what goes on in other people's houses?

This is what I always wonder about the home visits that teachers do before a child starts school. What are they looking for and does it not, in someway, contribute towards this categorisation of children? So if little Benny starts hurting others, they think back and go 'oh but little Benny lived in that nice three bed and the mum gave me herbal tea' compared to 'oh little Benny, his mum forgot we were coming and there was a strong smell of fags in the flat, that explains it.'

Also way more booze in general in MC kids party's, my WC friends down tea and would think it was inappropriate.
Definitely more anxiety about their kids health and others judgement in WC circles in my experience.

[quote catfunk]@LovePoppy clearly not the point but ok [/quote]
obviously it is.

Someone was taking care of the poor neglected children

[quote Walkaround]@Monday26July - why do you think it benefits a parent to evade the help of social services?[/quote]
Sorry, I don’t understand your question? I don’t. Social services are there first and foremost to support and help, and only in really dangerous situations to work towards getting a child to a safer environment. I wonder if you’ve misunderstood something I’ve said.

@paddlingon

Many social workers who feel at ease challenging and investigating working class parents suspected of neglect or abuse find themselves anxious and unsure/wrongfooted when they’re tasked with the same job but with parents who are well spoken, highly educated and know their rights.

I really don't find this resonating with my experience.
Plenty of SW's are highly educated, attended Russell group universities I certainly wasn't the only one.
All my colleagues regardless of their education understood the rights of the families they work with.
Working with lawyers, barristers is a weekly experience pretty much in child protection.
When I got my first complaint a colleague told me if you aren't getting any complaints then you probably aren't doing your job properly.

On reflection with more years as a therapist I'm not sure that is actually true. But you will get complaints. ( usually on the last cases you would expect)

Doesn't mean there aren't bad or incompetent social workers, of course there are but social workers aren't stressed by the middle classes.

Interesting. In my experience social work tends to be a very working class type of profession, or at least in the past decade which is the time period I’m familiar with.

I didn’t mean to suggest SWs don’t know the law or the rights of their service users, that’s their bread and butter and law modules feature prominently in social work education.

I’m glad to hear you say this anyway, I don’t have first hand experience of the child protection area of SW but I hope it is as you say.

There has been some research into this topic that thread participants might find interesting. Here’s an excerpt from professor Claudia Bernard’s paper (2017):

THEME 2: Privilege and Entitlement
All of the participants recounted that affluent parents’ social class placed them at an advantage over the social workers and formed a major barrier to the level and depth of potential intervention. The common view expressed was that socially-privileged parents had access to powerful social networks, which some used to resist social work interventions.
“They know where to go with complaints, they know people within the council because the place is so small as well, they'll get on to their local councillor, someone who they go hunting or shooting with or playing golf, that's the reality of working in a very small place like this (and affluent) they know people in high places and they threaten you with people as well. So you've got to be confident when you arrive and know what you're talking about”.
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For example, in one of the smaller counties in the sample one of the cases that came to child protection workers’ attention involved a child whose parents were well established members of the community with high status in the county, the parents therefore called on various members in the community to give personal testimonies attesting to how upstanding they were and therefore good parents. On the other hand, the main concern of other parents were to do with shame and the stigma associated with social work involvement, and were therefore fearful that knowledge or suspicion of neglect of the children might spread to their social networks. Participants elaborated the ways that the parents’ class backgrounds gave them an unspoken advantage, which meant that they were generally knowledgeable about the workings of organisations such as children’s social care and the safeguarding process; perhaps more crucially, their sense of entitlement, brought a greater confidence to challenge the child protection decision-making processes. A number of participants expressed that because of parents’ social status, income, and educational backgrounds they looked down on social workers, who they considered were beneath them, thus their intervention was often seen as an unwarranted intrusion. Such class elements formed a major barrier to developing constructive relationships with parents. Some participants also gave detailed examples of the various ways parents exercised class-based privilege to deliberately undermine their professional authority. For example, some participants spoke of being belittled and humiliated by parents in meetings, leaving them feeling as if they had to prove themselves and establish their credibility. Some reflected the view that, from the perspective of affluent parents, being told what is in their children’s best
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interests by social workers was not an experience they welcomed, resulting in the wishes and feelings of the parents taking precedence over the needs of the children. Some also pointed out that certain parents felt that, if they had to have any social work involvement at all, they should only have to deal with managers.

www.gold.ac.uk/media/documents-by-section/departments/social-therapeutic-and-comms-studies/Report---Neglect-in-Affluent-Families-1-December-2017.pdf

Op I think this is not about being 'middle class', more about people who have a decent amount of money with accompanying trappings like big house, car and 'things', which look glossy on the outside. Anybody could have that, frankly, regardless of social status; there is a taxi driver and family living over the road to me who have noisy parties on a regular basis. I imagine if anyone called social services on them for being irresponsible parents (I'm not saying they are, I don't know them), their home, cars, clothes etc would make them look as though they were OK.

I'm only mentioning that family because they illustrate that money and privilege happens everywhere regardless of class. For all I know they could be marvellous parents.

However surely Social Services are trained to look below the surface, especially nowadays when so much has come to light about abuse.

There are also people who are not well off at all but manage and have an aura of respectability, an image which they play up to. They don't drink much, their children are neat and clean, well mannered.. That can mask abuse because they appear to be last people who would ever abuse or neglect a child. I can think of a couple of 'respectable' families just like that, whom I knew in the past, who actually lived a lie; class didn't enter into it. You have to live with people to really know them because only then the mask slips.