AIBU to think Police should investigate Child Abuse rather than Social Worker.

[Lockdownbear]

Far to many child abuse cases seem to slip through the net. Child abuse and neglect are both criminal offences, why are they checked out by SW rather than police ?
Surely the police are the experts in criminal enquiries, let them check cases out then the SW get involved later if necessary.

Oh god no. I don't know if there is a right answer. But currently, the police have massively, massively cocked up my daughter's case (sexually abused by her dad for 4 years) and it's a complete and utter dystopian nightmare trying to right their wrongs and get this criminal convicted. Social services... what a joke. I have realised that if I was complicit in this abuse or just a total letdown of a parent in any other way, and if my daughter was dependent on the 'system' to protect her, she'd be utterly sunk. The bottom line is, children are let down on a systemic level in this country: Police, SS, GPs... collectively, they let children down. I think in all honesty, most people by nature minimise big shit and those very people are sitting at desks making decisions about children's welfare- decisions they're not really fit to make. There are a few good ones out there but in my own experience, I haven't come across them yet. It's been pretty disastrous, my own experience with regards to DD's 'support' from police and SS.

[quote NellieBertram]@arcticfoxed - no that is not what happens now. Social workers (and health visitors) just have hugely unmanageable and unsafe caseloads.[/quote]
And high thresholds because they don’t have capacity to take on everyone who needs.

Name change for this. I’m a social worker in Scotland. No longer in Child protection. Yabu as police and sw do a joint investigation into abuse of children. I’ve got to say that people can be very convincing, manipulative and as a result the wool is pulled over our eyes.. we must always do better. I am haunted by the news that said little Arthur repeatedly said no one is going to feed him and no one loves him. In hindsight I sit here and think what would I have done ? Strip him of his clothes for a thorough inspection? Of course not, I’d lose my job, and obviously we don’t work like that! In all honesty I probably would have done the same as the sw, walked out the door because things appeared to be ok? I bet your bottom dollar though that the sw got a gut feeling about the case but couldn’t do anything. I’m not saying they knew he was being abused, but that there was something not right. I work with offenders, those on life licences in the community and that includes a variety of offending including those who have killed children. When one of my clients is up to something (but there are no obvious signs or evidence) most of the time there is a gut feeling but little you can do until you find evidence. It’s like the pieces of the jigsaw don’t fit correctly in your brain and something is telling you something is wrong. But this is with clients I have been working with for months, if not years. Although there are cases that I’ve been shocked to hear of an arrest/concerning behaviour. TIME is what child protection services need, not spending hours, days, weeks on assessments/reports when analysis is key.

Social services are massively understaffed and so many staff are at breaking point. The government is to be blamed, the funding cuts, low pay, lack of guidance and supervision, inexperienced staff having totally unmanageable caseloads are all huge areas of concern.
If you are, quite rightly, horrified by this case then please please don't vote for a Conservative government. Social care is at breaking point and cases like this will happen again and again whilst the Tories continue to make cuts.

all the money in the world thrown at social services wont make any difference

SS and police completely let down some of my vulnerable family members. I won’t go into details but only one managed to escape, while the rest have been left there. The perpetrators have been forgotten about since COVID no anger management class or parenting classes. SS are no longer interested and they’ve been left. The one that has escaped is living with family and is safe but in serious need of therapy which is not being provided. I’d like to say the one that did escape still isn’t free and feels guilty for alerting SS and police who in turn have failed to protect the rest.

If the police took over, there would be more deaths.
I have a few friends who until fairly recently were child protection, social workers. They have all left as they say the workload is so high that it is impossible to do a good job and they were worried a child they were responsible for could die as a result.

@Fluffyunicorn1

I know someone who’s children were on child protection plans. She constantly drinks, takes drugs, is very volatile and violent when drunk. All of her children have different dads (7 kids 7 dads and only 2 dads involved). She has been arrested for dv on one man and the others have ran away because of her behaviour.

I spoke to her social worker as part of their enquiries because I know her well (her dd is friends with mine) and I told the social worker all of my concerns. She screams and shouts at her kids and her dad has often told me she doesn’t want to go home because mummy shouts at her and hits her. The social worker said well I can only go on what I witness and she deals with the childrens behaviour appropriately whilst I’m there. I said of course she does! Who’s going to abuse their kids in front of a social worker?!

She ticked the boxes of a well kept house, food and well dressed kids. Except the kids are living in torture of a drunk mum who has a different man constantly and also shows no interest in her kids what so ever but still social services took the kids off the protection plan and said they weren’t concerned

I think you would be shocked to know how high thresholds are for intervention.

@LittlestLightOnTheXmasTree

all the money in the world thrown at social services wont make any difference

This isn't true. But I don't think that child deaths are totally preventable any more than any other kind of violence is.

The problem with police is they deal with crimes after they've been committed. And they're weighted on the side of innocent until proven guilty. So in this case they'd take their lead from SS on whether a crime had been committed, I think.

@MissCruellaDeVil

Sorry but you sound woefully uneducated around the roles of social workers and police officers. Child abuse is a specialist area that police officers don't have the knowledge, or the resources to deal with. Extend the power of social workers for sure, but don't take them away.

This! Social workers are specialists in what they do, police officers are generalists expected to attend when an ambulance can’t with no proper training past first aid, to look after mental health patients when there are no appointments for 12 hours with no training, as well as attend all the “regular” police stuff.

I don't think all deaths are preventable but this one was.

@Alltheblue

The problem with police is they deal with crimes after they've been committed. And they're weighted on the side of innocent until proven guilty. So in this case they'd take their lead from SS on whether a crime had been committed, I think.

No they would not.

So many experts in child abuse investigation all of a sudden. The police do investigate child abuse. They have specialist officers… the Met had the biggest child abuse investigation team in the world but had to amalgamate with other units because of the £600 million savings they had to make. It’s a fucking hard job… I can’t begin to tell you how difficult. But let’s face it… you don’t care you just want to bang on about agency failings. I dare say there are few people here prepared to volunteer as foster parents which is something concrete you could do to help

In all honesty I probably would have done the same as the sw, walked out the door because things appeared to be ok?

Even though he was rake thin and could barely stand? Its horrible to think of the children you have to leave in homes where your gut feeling is telling you they are not safe.
Most of us have no idea, we really, really don't.

So in this case they'd take their lead from SS on whether a crime had been committed, I think

No you’re absolutely wrong.

I would say that as a SW I worked with some decently trained and committed police officers who specialized in child protection.
But there were even fewer of them employed than social workers. Trying to dump everything on the already stretched police isn't going to help anyone.

Was he rake thin and could barely stand in front of the sw? Serious question as I don’t know the answer. Should have said I have not read all of the details about this case but I certainly will. I need to. Yes it is awful,when I said about gut feelings it’s not always that you know it’s abuse, I speak mostly about that in relation to working with offenders, when you know something is off. Most recently when I felt this way it kept me up for nights on end as I felt I was ‘waiting’ for something to happen. It did. Aside from stalking the guy there was nothing I could do ..

Thanks for everyone taking the time to explain how SW and police work on child protection. I feel I'm getting a better understanding of the complexity of those awful situations.

And thanks even more to those working in CP with competence and dedication. It must be so tough!

I work alongside police and I have seen them remove children under police emergency protection powers, only for others to put them back in the family home as soon as the emergency order is up.

Part of the problem is an appalling lack of foster and respite care, very often there simply isn’t anywhere for the child/ren to go if they are removed, and it takes time to sort out placements. So they leave them and try and work with the parents.

It is very frustrating from a police perspective. Plus cps rarely push criminal charges unless very extreme.

Mind i read an article earlier where ptb were blaming all sorts re. Arthur. Covid meant they couldn’t go in the house, no school meant teachers weren’t seeing him, and the neighbours didn’t step up and report when they must have heard his cries

In reality he slipped through the net. And that is what needs addressing.

To be honest, having worked in a professional role supporting families who were under SS (sometimes begging SS to remove children and sometimes seeing SS go for removal totally inappropriately in my view), the idea that we need a blanket anything is totally wrong and dangerous.
We don’t need raised thresholds. Arthur most definitely met the threshold.
What we need is high quality social workers, our brightest and best with the appropriate amount of time to make these life altering (saving in some cases) judgements.
Knee jerk ‘remove more children’ is very damaging, as is vicious cuts to LAs which mean social work teams are understaffed and carrying too high caseloads. Rarely do compassionate, highly skilled SWs stay in the job. It’s flipping emotionally and physically exhausting.
High profile cases where they mess up, do nothing to persuade the clever, intuitive A level student that his or her career should be in social work.
Demand more money for social work.

Demand more public spending.
Remember the many times they save lives.
Demand better for children, absolutely.

I really don't think lockdown is to blame for this given the police and SS had every opportunity were given evidence. This child didn't slip from view, he was ignored in plain sight.

I find it particularly awful that the police reluctantly received photos of abuse from Arthur's uncle and said he'd show his sergeant and get back but never did. Like the child was an aggravating neighborhood dispute or a bollard in the wrong place. Never knew police had such a lackadaisical attitude to child abuse. At the very least it warranted a response to his worried uncle.

I truly believe social workers main role is just a buffer between the public and the government to absorb the anger/blame. They are so (purposely) severely underfunded it is nigh on impossible to do the job - it is like employing a builder without tools then being pissed off his work is shit!

When terrible tragedies happen it is the SW's faces splashed all over The Sun - your average Joe doesn't give a shit about how underfunded/under-resourced/overworked social services are - no-one campaigns for better funded services (like they do the NHS) Social workers are not seen as heroes, no-one clapped for them - they're incompetent do-gooders, or evil child-snatchers. In reality, they're just people - who can fuck up/be deceived like any one of us.

Nobody cares, until a little ones face is splashed all over the media. We've just had national insurance rises to (apparently!) fund care for older people; how often do we hear about the social care crisis for the elderly? Very rarely children are mentioned. The charities and outside agencies SWs would have worked alongside with in the past have been cut to the bone/disappeared. Now words like 'resilience' have replaced 'support' and thresholds are so high most 'at risk' kids will get nowhere near the net, never mind slip through it.

Yet we have Johnson publicly declaring those who have 'failed' poor Arthur will be found and punished - how fucking DARE HE? Completely absolving himself and his government from any responsibility at all - and the public go along with it, baying for the SWs blood instead

Social workers are merely the asylum seekers of social care - somewhere for the government to point to when things go tits up, just a buffer.

@New1name

Was he rake thin and could barely stand in front of the sw? Serious question as I don’t know the answer. Should have said I have not read all of the details about this case but I certainly will. I need to. Yes it is awful,when I said about gut feelings it’s not always that you know it’s abuse, I speak mostly about that in relation to working with offenders, when you know something is off. Most recently when I felt this way it kept me up for nights on end as I felt I was ‘waiting’ for something to happen. It did. Aside from stalking the guy there was nothing I could do ..

To be honest I don't think he was, and I shouldn't have said that it just feeds into the incompetent social workers narrative.

As for Arthur he was failed by the police too. His uncle reported to the POLICE concerned that he was in danger and they threatened arrest instead due to ‘lock down’. Never went to investigate . Most family members tried he was let down by professionals