To think this is absolutely horrific?

[cruzrack]

Cannot believe I'm reading this...

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/dad-injects-heroin-toddlers-help-25356048.amp

"There has to be a balance but I think it's gone too far in the favour of the parents over the children"

Then you need to read the research into how damaging removal is for children.

SW don't remove children, Judges do. The SWs can try to influence a case by how they present things. But it's upto a Judge. Look at the cases of the children who have gone on to be murdered after being returned to the parents. Often the Judge has gone against every other professional involved in the case.

"Aren't the courts unwilling to take children away because the care system/ children's homes have a very poor outcome"

Yes, clean beds and nice foster parents don't solve the complex damage done.

@Ponoka7

"Aren't the courts unwilling to take children away because the care system/ children's homes have a very poor outcome"

Yes, clean beds and nice foster parents don't solve the complex damage done.

And that is if they get nice foster parents because they are also in limited supply.

A poster on another thread said that the social workers she has to deal with are like all other council workers. Enough said.

Nothing surprises me anymore. The levels of awfulness that some people will stoop to makes the newspapers a daily catalogue of horror. It's completely depressing.

@Malibuismysecrethome

A poster on another thread said that the social workers she has to deal with are like all other council workers. Enough said.

I assume you are some higher class of being?

What kind of a remark is that anyway?

The other side of the coin that social workers have to deal with is the cases where parents run to the papers with very one-sided accounts of how their children were "snatched from them". Certain papers (Daily Mail, I'm looking at you) absolutely love printing their reports complete with lots of carefully posed sadface pictures of the parents. I know that mistakes do get made, but I'm always quite sceptical because SS are not allowed to give their side of the story.

This is extremely harrowing but to be honest I’m not surprised. There are so many disruptive, abusive, fucked-up kids in schools who are now most likely destined to follow in their parents footsteps because appropriate action wasn’t taken soon enough.

I don’t think a child born to an addict should stay with that parent.

This is so awful, the poor children.

On a point that another poster made:
Just a thought but is the term 'good enough parenting' used since they cannot remove all children because there just aren't enough foster carers or places for the removed children to live. There is a shortage of foster carers since it is a very demanding role. Many children are very damaged and have very challenging behaviour and special needs (hitting out and other behaviours breaking things , throwing, soiling, learning needs, no sense of danger, sexually inappropriate behaviours to give just a few examples).

I dont know what CP socail workers are like, but my childrens disability SW is worse than a chocolate teapot. They leave in droves. They dont have enough staff or time. I have never seen mine in person since she took us on in August.

If I complain I am basically told having a SW is a honour, privalidge and i should be honoured. My SW cancels every meeting as she is in court at a days notice ( I struggle to believe that tbh. Like I say she isnt CP).

They have zero idea what my childrens lives are like or my house. They dont talk to school. They basically dont want to see any needs. They dont have time to deal with abuse or neglect as they cant even meet statatory duty.

IF I wanted too, i could hide anything from mine. They could sleep on the floor and be a child sex ring. Honestly, honestly they arent there for the families or the kids. I am there to provide them with a living. That is the bottom line

@Elderflower14

A late friend of mine used to foster straight from the hospital new born heroin addicted babies.... The terrible mewling cry is something i hope I never ever hear again... 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢

Did you ever read EarthMotherImNot's thread in Classics on this? I cried my eyes out reading it, those fosterers are amazing.

Those poor children. It seems to be that social services enable damage to children by leaving them with terrible parents for longer than they should. It all needs more funding.

The same link has an equally horrifying story of a 5 year old boy made to watch porn by his birth mother and tried to force him to have sex.

There are so very sick, damaged and twisted adults out there, the poor children.

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sick-woman-made-boy-5-25273807

@Platax

The other side of the coin that social workers have to deal with is the cases where parents run to the papers with very one-sided accounts of how their children were "snatched from them". Certain papers (Daily Mail, I'm looking at you) absolutely love printing their reports complete with lots of carefully posed sadface pictures of the parents. I know that mistakes do get made, but I'm always quite sceptical because SS are not allowed to give their side of the story.

There are certain groups on Facebook about forced adoption ,I stumbled across ,every single one of those parents believe their child/ children were stolen from them ,the scary thing is they share photographs of their children asking others to look out for them .

The thing that worries me is that are other abusive families seeing these kids slip through the SS’s gap and thinking “we’ll we aren’t that bad, carry on”.

There must be so many children suffering because of the poorly funded social care system.

@Ponoka7

"There has to be a balance but I think it's gone too far in the favour of the parents over the children"

Then you need to read the research into how damaging removal is for children.

SW don't remove children, Judges do. The SWs can try to influence a case by how they present things. But it's upto a Judge. Look at the cases of the children who have gone on to be murdered after being returned to the parents. Often the Judge has gone against every other professional involved in the case.

I know how damaging it can be to remove children although I wonder in those cases how much damage had already been done, but I also have worked with people who weren't taken away and I know how much damage they have experienced.

I made exactly the same point about the courts.

Maybe because they focus on fostering out children to give the parents a chance to get their act together rather than having them adopted to families that really want them.

I also agree that we need more support for struggling families. Where I've worked before funding was constantly being taken away. A lot of more robust financial support in counselling services, for example, has been taken away in favour of 'wellness courses' which is just a chocolate teapot for some families with serious issues.

Absolutely disgusting! Those poor poor children. To think of all the things we go through to be able to drive and maintain a car and yet anyone can go off and have a child. Stories like this makes me literally feel sick 😭

Absolutely shocking,but I think it emphasises the amount of pressure social workers are under ! People choose this career and study to the highest level because they care and they do want to make a difference. It’s box ticking and red tape that makes their job so hard and stressful.
It’s the same in nursing…paperwork before patient care ,bloody shocking!

These are the children who grow up into very damaged adults. It is heartbreaking.

@JackieWeaverHandforthCouncil

Poor kids. I hope they are much safer and happier now. It’s horrific but unsurprising when for some reason currently more focus is often spent trying to support neglectful parents and keep families together than on removing children from bad situations.

Every day those children were left in that situation caused more long term damage that social care, foster, adoptive parents and wider society will need to try and reverse. Imagine being a young child and seeing your dad injecting your baby siblings with drugs, your parents committing GBH on eachother and talking about suicide. Then imagine telling social services and being left in that situation for many more months whilst they fanny about trying to support your parents with parenting classes?

The bar for removal is set far too high and this is why I go when I see posts on here from people who’ve had kids removed claiming they didn’t do anything, their house was just a tiny bit messy etc.

Excellent post. And agree totally with your final paragraph.

@rrhuth

People also need to recognise that social workers are carrying maybe triple the recommended case loads. Imagine spending every day of your working life not just reading a story like this but actually in there, seeing the children, getting to know them, walking into their substandard homes - and knowing you can do nothing about it.

Then your colleague goes off sick (with stress, totally understandable) so your caseload is added to.

They work so hard, and there is nothing they can do to help people, and they are vilified by people who have never done a job anything like it in their lives.

People want magic solutions. Anyone using the word 'streamlining' and 'efficiency' can fuck right off.

This 100%…imagine how bloody soul destroying it must be ! I have two friends who are SW ..absolutely beautiful,incredible people who work their arses off !

This case is local to me
We never hear of the good outcomes from child protection cases - I’m not a Social worker but have regular contact with them due to my job
Most SW have too high case loads, threshold for removing children is too high, court system can go either way, lack of suitable long term options to remove children to with good outcomes - most of these are due to lack of funding in the social care system

It is horrific and it goes on and on. But all our services have been so under funded over the years that social workers and other agencies just do not have the staff to cope. These people have also got lives.

One of my friend's ex-neighbors finally had her child taken off her after years of drug taking, drink, prostitution, loads of men who could have done god knows what to the child, no food in the house. The school knew about it. But the neighbor puts on a good show and the child was returned to the most chaotic life. Biological is not always best but foster care isn't always that great either. Again, funding ....

@Pinkorangutan

I've been told by someone who was trying to adopt that it's not just the social workers or the police but the courts that make it so difficult to take children away. The belief that children are better off with their biological parents seems to trump everything. Also the 'rights' of the biological parents to 'be able to prove that they can get it right just drags on for so long even when they've shown they cannot parent adequately or even safely.

There has to be a balance but I think it's gone too far in the favour of the parents over the children. The media don't help as they always highlight the sadface parents fighting to get their children back as if social services just do it for fun.

I think you are right. A friend of mine was fostering a 14 year old pregnant girl. She didn't want the baby, asked for it to be adopted but SW put pressure on her, foster mum was not supposed to care for the baby except during school hours but inevitably had to. The baby was left like that for nearly 2 years until the girl was old enough and assertive enough to say she would not care for the baby and wanted it adopted.

As foster mum said that little one had all that disruption to their life when they could have been happily settled with an adoring adopted family when only weeks old. She would love to have adopted but recognised she was too old to adopt a baby.

So a vulnerable child (she really was) not just supported in keeping her baby but pretty well forced to.

@Malibuismysecrethome

A poster on another thread said that the social workers she has to deal with are like all other council workers. Enough said.

What does that mean. If it's the thread I'm thinking about I wouldn't set much store by that anyway