to be confused about social services

[whentheraincame]

Bit of a long one but it's something I have thought about a long time. There's two narratives:

SS don't do enough; don't act to remove children in obvious danger (happens sometimes of course)

SS are overzealous; remove children from loving homes (going to happen at times, right?)

there was a show over ten years ago called I Want my Baby Back and it was absolutely heartbreaking and admittedly it terrified me. Basically hairline fractures were found in children and parents were blamed for abuse. The argument was (I forget details and could never watch again) from some doctors that these were the result of Vitamin D deficiency (which let's face it, was endemic a while back and in the news loads)

So the argument was those children were wrongly removed. One mother cried "I want my baby" and honestly it's never left me. I'll have a cry about this later as I always do if I think too much about a child being removed from a loving mum.

So my question is if anyone has proper insight. I'm scared of SS in general. Although I actually had involvement with them myself when I left an abusive ex and they came to check I was not going to go back, nothing further happened once they met me - so proof they are fine I guess.

But I remember seeing a lady on the news, well spoken, and saying SS need to return her children who were removed. I had a friend tell me in work once that a friend with undiagnosed autism got the children removed due an incident where one got hurt by the other (which happens. these things happen, children do get hurt and it's often an accident that couldn't be prevented)

I guess I just don't want to see SS as evil child snatchers, and want insight into how they operate in reality and what actually gets children removed from parents' care?

Did you not believe your child? Your defence of whatever it is the family friend did sounds worrying to me.

@Jellycatspyjamas i just don’t think that’s a good enough excuse for allow errors to remain of case notes.

Its funny that I also had experiences of my DD being called the wrong name, in sessions where they were trying to offer ‘support’ after her disclosure. She’s 9 now and thankfully doesn’t remember a lot but at the time she was absolutely distraught at these awful people poking their incompetent noses into her life. She hated it when they came round, and when I told them that they saw it as a red flag about me

I think you’ve maybe misread my post - where have I defended the man?

Fucking hell getting deja vu now - misreading, not listening properly and twisting my words.

@Jellycatspyjamas i just don’t think that’s a good enough excuse for allow errors to remain of case notes.

I agree, I wasn’t excusing it - you asked Joe it happens and in my experience that’s how it happens. When I started as a CP social worker I had a case load of 12, which was considered high. When I left direct practice I had a case load of 32. The reality is people will buckle under that kind of workload and paperwork is one of the areas where it shows, for some workers.

Ah I see, Apologies @Jellycatspyjamas

A caseload of 32 is insane. The more cynical part of me wonders if the system is designed to break people. Why wouldn’t those who can change it, want to change it? No wonder retention rate is shockingly low

As a foster carer the vast majority of children I have come across absolutely needed to be removed and IMO were often left far too long while social care worked at keeping the family together. I am sure their parents spin a completely different story however.

@Jellycatspyjamas
Was.coming on to say the same.

University's make money for having students, they don't seem to care what kind of dross they allow to train as a social worker as long as they have bums on seats.

I was appalled by some of the students abilities/behaviours when I trained. I wouldn't have let at least half of them look after my cat.

I've been a GP for over 25 years so I've seen a fair number of child protection cases. Not once have a met an "overzealous" SW, and nor have I seen a child removed who shouldn't have been. I've seen plenty who should have been but weren't though.

In my experience the vast majority of the parents whose kids have been taken away definitely love their kids. But their own upbringing was abusive/neglectful so they don't really know how to love their kids in a parenting way, if you see what I mean. One example - lovely woman, kind, sensitive, truly loved her kids. But if she was tired she slept in, and they didn't go to school. If the kids didn't want to clean their teeth, they didn't have to. When they had nits they didn't like their hair being combed, so she didn't do it. If the kids wanted sweets instead of proper food, she didn't know how to say no. If she didn't feel like doing laundry, the kids wore dirty clothes. SWs worked with her for years, trying to teach her that love alone wasn't enough - as a parent you have to do other stuff, beyond hugging them and telling them you love them. After years of chances her kids were taken away. She never showed any sign of understanding where she'd gone wrong, so after several court appearances, the foster placements were turned to adoption placements, and that was the end for her. She won't see her kids again unless they seek her out as adults. It was sad - I'd known this lady since she was a troubled teen herself - but ultimately it wasn't fair on the kids to leave them in a state of poor nutrition, rotting teeth, nits, no education, general chaos.

I have many many more similar stories.

See unless there’s more to that story I don’t think that giving sweets to kids in lieu of dinner now and again is worthy of removing children. Surely their outcomes being in the system would be a lot worse?

I imagine if SS by default poked into the lives of every parent, there’d be plenty of reasons from everybody to have ‘concerns’.

A caseload of 32 is insane. The more cynical part of me wonders if the system is designed to break people. Why wouldn’t those who can change it, want to change it? No wonder retention rate is shockingly low

It was crazy, I moved out of practice because I simply couldn’t be sure I could practice safely and wasn’t prepared to have a dead child on my conscience.

Meaningful change would take money - for decently trained staff, to weed unsuitable people out of the profession, for increased staffing, for good quality supervision. Social work has been consistently underfunded, the “efficiency” measures brought in actively work against good, relationship base, long term intervention which is what so many families need. No one wants to vote for more funding for social work, but that’s what’s needed.

You do realise that taking a DC from their parents is traumatic to the DC? Taking them into care is not a neutral action.

I read that post thinking exactly the same. It sounds very inconsistent - the family I referred to in my post left their 2 year old strapped in a pushchair downstairs while the rest of the family was upstairs. This clearly happened on a regular basis because the child's communication was really poor. And it took literal years before those children were removed.

Yet in other areas providing for DC in a basic way with them being loved still is enough to have them removed?

Stuff like that does sound very odd, unless you are leaving huge details out.

Sorry to be that person but can we not discuss professional cases of actual families we work with. It might be anonymously on the Internet but it's some poor kids story and that's recognisable if you were that mum or the dc.

But if she was tired she slept in, and they didn't go to school. If the kids didn't want to clean their teeth, they didn't have to. When they had nits they didn't like their hair being combed, so she didn't do it. If the kids wanted sweets instead of proper food, she didn't know how to say no. If she didn't feel like doing laundry, the kids wore dirty clothes.

Did you read the whole picture @LydiaBennetsUglyBonnet - not just about sweets, but lack of routine, dental care, clean clothes, general boundary setting etc.

There was a case in Scotland of an 18 month old who died through neglect, infested with lice, teeth an absolute devastation, under nourished - her family didn’t come to the attention of social work because they weren’t considered untypical for the area in which she lived, basically staff in school and in health were so used to seeing that level of deprivation that her siblings didn’t attract significant enough concern. The ambulance and hospital examination room had to be fumigated after her siblings had been transported and examined such was the level of infestation - and no one reported them because they weren’t out of the ordinary in the area they lived.

Sorry to be that person but can we not discuss professional cases of actual families we work with.

I agree. The case I referred to above, and the information I’ve shared, is in the public domain as it was the subject of a significant case review.

I did read the rest of the post and I still think that while it IS subpar parenting, removing children and putting them in a system whereby lifelong outcomes are so shockingly poor, is not a better option.

Had to google that case, it's absolutely awful but again comparing like for like a mum who is struggling with day to day life and could probably use support, and a family who literally starved a child to death, does not seem fair at all and I imagine is the exact sort of thing people worry about.

It's the GPs post @Jellycatspyjamas not the review.

Injave heard so many claims about sexism in the industry too and how the bar is set shockingly lower for dads than mums. I wonder if a single dad who is occasionally late for the school run and feeds his kids sweets would even register on SS’s radar

I guess the question is how long do you leave it - and that’s hard to know because the care the child receives at home isn’t without impact either. If you leave it for too long there’s long term developmental harm and you still potentially have the trauma of removal if mum can’t cope as the child grows into teenage hood.

@Jellycatspyjamas in terms of ‘how long’, well I don’t think that there should be a standard one-size-fits-all timeframe, every family, and their risks, will be different and I imagine it will be based on that?

I've changed some details so my story is not recognisable, but the principles are the same. And actually I think it's useful for people who aren't involved in these cases - people whose only knowledge is from TV and tabloids - to see what some of the reasons are for children to be taken into care. I think it's useful to see that not all these cases involve monstrous parents. They can be kind loving people, but people who don't have the basic skills required to safely parent kids, invariably because their own childhood was similar. Hopefully sometimes the cycle can be broken.

And I'm not talking about giving your kids sweets now and then - honestly that was a really bizarre conclusion to draw from my post. I'm not talking about skipping cleaning teeth occasionally, nor missing school if everyone is exhausted now and then. I'm talking about daily habitual failure to meet these basic parenting targets.

Had to google that case, it's absolutely awful but again comparing like for like a mum who is struggling with day to day life and could probably use support

The thing is, those parents started out (at least from the outside) as mums who were struggling and could use day to day support. They didn’t wake up one day and decide to starve their child - bit by bit, their care worsened. Their older children were in school, they were seeking health advice etc etc.

The trick is to know which ones just need a bit of support and which ones will go on to kill their child.

But what is actually done to help break the cycle? Does anyone even try?

@Sarahcoggles can you confirm where I ‘defended’ the man who my DD made a disclosure about?