To think social workers need much better protection when they visit threatening families?

[Jane379]

After the recent terrible case of Preston Davey, I noticed some posts on threads here mentioning the danger social workers are often in when they DO try and report things. Threats from the families, outright intimidating behaviour when they do visit etc

Police etc have weapons. Social workers are mainly women so more physically vulnerable,,and they can't carry weapons of course. Naively I assumed they were protected from aggressive clients, but it seems there's shockingly little protection.

AIBU to think social workers visiting agesssive families need something like a bodyguard? More protection than they currently get, anyway. Few jobs require people to visit potentially aggressive and dangerous homes with such minimal protection. With the amount of cases, the danger, etc , it's no wonder it's hard to recruit social workers.

If there were more male social workers- and more generally- maybe they could help on challenging visits? I expect aggressive clients would be more reluctant to intimidate if men were present.

It's probably the same as it is in my job. I'm a mental health nurse in the community- we tend to visit in pairs of there is a risk history. If it's too risky to go to someone's house, people have to come in to clinic. Social workers obviously have to complete home visits and don't have that luxury.

The things keeping assaults down will be a) most people are probably on their best behaviour for a child social worker and b) most people who work in social care/MH know the best way of avoiding physical violence is having excellent rapport building skills/conflict resolution. Learning how to respond to anger is a vital skill. You have to frame it that you are there in a supportive capacity to keep families together/help everyone involved. It's very different to something like being in the police force, where things like the uniform alone can be enough to agitate people.

These jobs should absolutely offer staff more protection, but there isn't any, so you just crack on. It is what it is.

What happened to Preston was horrific, but there are so many professionals who could have "stepped up" and "joined the dots"
Varley text his sister saying he was dead meat. He told colleagues (teachers) that he was having thoughts of killing the baby. Health visitors were involved and had done home visits. When police were contacted by social services regarding a potential injury, medical staff told police they had no concerns about the injury being non-accidental. 999 was contacted on one occasion and Varley could be heard saying "put the phone down" before the line went dead. This call was never followed up on. The only person responsible for baby Prestons death was James Varley.

If you think you could do a better job, why dont you train up to become a social worker and see what its really like on the other side.

That is a deflection; my career path is irrelevant to the serious issues highlighted . We don't need to be social workers to recognize that critical red flags were missed. The real focus should be on how we can ensure better outcomes for vulnerable children in the future, and stop keep saying lessons will be learnt.

It's quite reasonable to ask why doctors and social workers didn't investigate Preston's hospital admissions more for a start , it's incompetence.
Didn't one of the social workers text vardy and say well done for taking him to the hospital you did the right thing or something similar.

Why are SW etc so willing to believe the parents and carers. When they say the child's had an accident oldest one in the book. Child should have been thoroughly examined and returned to foster mum to see if those hospital admissions kept happening under her care. Answer is no. The signs were there.
The whole system doesn't seem fit for purpose.

That's the starting salary for newly qualified and it jumps about £5k after the first year. It's a better starting salary than teaching and nursing.

There are not enough social workers to visit the children they have already, working in pairs for every visit is logistically impossible.

HNRTFT and NC but I do agree that SW particularly for child protection should be protected. My daughter walks into homes which are dangerous for females!>
I worry every day for her safety.
She is professional and confidential but the nature of her job involves dealing with substance abuse etc .

Absolutely! I am an ex social worker and now run my own business. I had to take a full year off work due to a series of very serious incidents that left me with PTSD. These included death threats from fathers with gang ties, threatened with stabbing, physical intimidation, walking into absolute squalor, disclosures of incest and child sexual abuse, being followed, stalked and verbally assaulted and an attempted sexual assault. The service I worked at now has proper security but did not when I worked there. It's a very common issue. I am lucky that I got great support, responded well to medication and have a great family but some people are not so lucky and are impacted for life. Or worse they get seriously hurt. Thankyou for thinking of us and for raising this!

Yes. Adult MH is the highest risk if it is community based. However most services are aware of this and there will be either a 2 male visit or paired visit. CP is really fraught because there are not enough CP workers for regular paired visits. Community MH tends to be better staffed for some reason.

When they say the child's had an accident oldest one in the book.

• This is true- but on the other thread a pp pointed out that children settling into a new home may be more active, especially if nervous, and in a new environment accidents are more likely to happen. Children who are 't adopted and are in non-abusive families may still have accidents..

So I think red flags definitely were missed re Preston but there are reasons apart from abuse which could explain a higher frequency. There needs to be a lower threshold to intervene but at the same time inspections of non abused children raise their own issues, though clearly something needs to change.

The whole system doesn't seem fit for purpose.

• what do you think should be changed? The most obvious thing seems to be that more staff are urgently needed so cases can be examined more carefully, staff can work in pairs to be safer etc but how can that be done ? Something must be...

I was a detective in child abuse investigation about 10 years ago before moving into a training role. I was based in central London. I had a really good working relationship with most of the SW I worked with and would do lots of joint visits with them. I would also do solo visits but I would at least have people who knew where I was and radios etc. Both services were underfunded but the difference between the services is I didn’t care really about having a good relationship with the parents. I wasn’t horrible but I didn’t have an ongoing need to be nice to them. It’s a tricky line to walk to be there to obtain information and offer support but to also maintain a professional neutrality.

It really boggles my mind when I see threads that claim big conspiracies to remove children from families. I appreciate that I wouldn’t admit it if I were part of some big kidnapping scheme but families are fucking awful to their children and If I removed a child I always felt absolutely confident I did the right thing. I didn’t have much confidence about their ongoing success because I knew the outcomes for children in care is not very good. The public are very good at criticising but there not very good at stepping up and offering practical help like foster parenting. It’s always someone else expected to do the grunt work

Yep, without social workers our son would be dead, likely his older birthday sibling too. His birth mother tells anyone and everyone how social workers are liars, she was an amazing mum, never did anything wrong etc. Oddly enough people aren’t to keen to admit that they are prolific child abusers.

Social work is having a rethink :) all local authorities are currently having to restructure in line with the children's wellbeing and schools act 2026.

@RoseField1 so far that restructure has led to a depressing amount of our experienced social workers leaving!

I think it's tricky, when my dd had an A&E admission due to a small overdose when struggling with her MH. She was 16. A report was made to Social Services. I received a call from a gentleman who was not very respectful, so heavily accented I could barely understand him and who was asking me if I needed support but when I asked what support that was, couldn't tell me. The standard of service was woeful.

Whilst that was just one interraction, I did come away from it thinking "goodness, no wonder there are so many tragedies". At that time Children's Services at my LA were in special measures.

Restructures always do. I don't know how it's working in practice as my LA is a late adopter but from what I can see it isn't going to make a huge difference to frontline social workers and since it's happening everywhere, I don't understand the impetus to leave 🤷‍♀️

@Runningswanker

Why are they leaving? What’s the structure doing?

Because the perp presumably knows that battering or killing a social worker on a visit where she’s known to be attending the property would get them in a shit tonne more trouble than just being there against the courts rules?

Why would they risk years in prison when social worker will find out they were there either way?

@Netcurtainnelly there was an excellent programme a few years ago called (something like) Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
You should watch it. You'll gain an insight into the fine line social workers have to tread, every single day. Supporting families, trying to keep them together while protecting the kids, gathering enough evidence to satisfy a court if they deem removal the best option. Teasing out the truth from conflicting accounts. Helping vulnerable and scared kids speak out about mum or dad.
It's a bloody hard and thankless job so let's stop judging how it 'should' be done.

@Jane379 Agree with your post. My DD is a SW and has never even been issued a personal attack alarm.

Looks like it's not available on iPlayer anymore unfortunately. Sounds worth a watch.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01bpjf7

No you don’t need to be a social worker to see red flags. It’s very easy with the benefit of hindsight, on a Monday evening with your coffee in hand to see the gaps. Especially given the media report so accurately and with no eye to sensationalism at all.

You do need to be a social worker to understand the very careful line they need to walk, to build and maintain a relationship with people who you know are harming their child, but you just can’t get the evidence for court. Being a social worker would help you understand why, with 30 kids on your case load and every one of which could go tragically wrong at any time, you may miss something. You do need to be a social worker to understand that working a 50 hour week and still not getting your work done will compromise your ability to join all the dots all the time particularly when health and education colleagues are painting very different pictures to what you see yourself.

And being a social worker means that the vast majority of parents on your books are lying to you - you just don’t know what they’re lying about. Throw in the threat of violence and aggression and it’s easy to see how mistakes get made.

I disagree that pairing up is always the solution, especially when as someone suggested above it could be an "entry level/minimum wage" person.

I work in community mental health and the last double up I did was to someone who the police refused to visit and told us we needed to go when we called to ask for a welfare check because he was emailing us long pages of incoherent rants. who had a load of weapons markers and had been threatening to neighbours. He previously held a professional in his house for a few hours without letting them leave, which is documented as taking a nurse hostage. We were worried he was unwell again

My plus ones on the first ocassion was someone on their induction, then it was a 66 year old member of staff with lots of physical health issues who is disabled. Its previously been students etc because its who can be spared.

Realistically when visiting someone what does a second person add? If they arent fully trained then it also adds someone that might inflame the situation

We often joke that it just needs to be someone you can run faster than, because the reality of what a second person will add when you are seeing people at home with access to weapons. Even when they dont have illicit weapons (frequently things like nunchucks, knuckle duster type things visible, ive sat under swords on the wall etc) its not uncommon to see people in the kitchen and being acutely aware of the knife block on the side as they shout at you

We have no lone worker devices. Just a normal phone to ring 999

Any rethink of social work so far has meant trying to do more with less. The new legislation doesn’t apply to the devolved nations so I don’t know what changes are being introduced but I don’t imagine it comes with any more resource.

Moving employers and teams can be a away for social workers to stay in the profession, it’s not always about the change itself, it can be the way it’s introduced that makes people decide to move on.

Im not a social worker but im acutely aware of the increase of the risk of social media that particularly impacts them

There's literally thousands of people on hundreds of Facebook groups devoted to exposing social workers, where people share pictures of social workeres and people comment openly threatening them. The comments are often vile, and about their kids

People often record us without our knowledge and it ends up all over Facebook, often spliced together to give a wrong impression

I know recently all over our local Facebook pages was a social worker name, picture (inc her kids), car reg with all sorts of allegations about her being a lesbian pedophile smuggling children on all thr local selling pages, community groups etc

It does actually, there is a budget of several billion in total