Social services failings

[mamaxbear]

The recent stories that have come out about Sara Sharif and Isabella Wheildon have really made me feel sick to my stomach. Innocent little girls being murdered by their parents and family, what is going on? I understand the huge pressures children’s services are under, but when will there be a change? I’ve had social workers involved throughout my whole childhood, my mum used to verbally and physically assault me and my siblings. We witnessed DV almost every weekend, she drank with her partners and it would just be carnage. When social workers came to assess, they saw that our home was tidy and we had food in the cupboards and off they went. It breaks my heart to think what these little girls and probably thousands of other children have been through or are currently going through. I have a 3 year old daughter myself. My heart hurts for these children.

it depends what kind of country you wish to live in ……what sort of power do you want them to have? Maybe you need to consider what society you want to bring your own children up in…..we all have choices..,,,I have worked alongside SWs most of my professional life …..in the main they are hard working and have the best interests of these families at heart…..they have done some great work with the families I work with…..,but resources are limited and unfortunately their are families that you will only ever spin plates with……there is disguised compliance from the parents and it is impossible to stop these tradgedies from happening

A poor child died. Such a tragic waste of life.

And her evil parents will now spend probably 30 or so years in prison costing the tax payer millions, which of course they fully deserve.

I just meant the whole case was so avoidable of her parents just lives and looked after her as parents should.

If a social worker isn't let into a home they can't just barge in. A Section 47 can be completed without consent of parents but if a child isn't going to school and the SW isn't being let into the home the information gathering will be limited and the child might not be spoken to.

This could be escalated to legal proceedings but there has to be evidence of impact on the child and this can be difficult to gather without seeing a child or lots of incidents of harm happening.

Social workers rely really heavily on building cooperative relationships with families and this is a large part of their skill set. When families actively seek to hide things SWs might not know what they don't know.

Over time a picture can be built and chronologies are really important in SW assessments. However, the children are sometimes in situations where repeated incidents happen until enough of a picture is built. It's shit but the alternative is removing children immediately in all scenarios of harm which is not the route I would want for us as a society to go down.

Just for clarity - I'm not seeking to minimise the awful awful tragedies experienced by Sara and Isabelle. Questions do need to be asked and changes made to interventions.

I think the judges should be looked at a lot closer
at the end of the day social workers can present all sorts to the courts but it’s the judges who make that final decision then when it goes wrong they’re nowhere to be seen

To all the social workers on the thread - thank you. What an incredibly tough job you do, and I'm sure little Sara's death weighs heavily on you all. If I was PM I would be doubling the Children's Services budget and halving everyone's workloads. It must be such a stressful profession when everything is so overstretched.

The ‘taking out of school’ was a massive red flag. If a child is under the supervision of SS in some capacity or even has been, then they should be court ordered to stay in school.

Ah here it is. What is the point of us? All the children who are protected, supported and rescued by us I would say is the point of us. God knows what role you do if you work alongside social workers and have never met a good one. Not a role where you meet many I would say. You have no clue how many families we help and children we protect. I'm sick of social worker bashing threads. We are just people, doing a really fucking hard job the best we can where the pay and conditions are low and the stakes are incredibly high.

The father applied to court I think, so the social worker was asked to recommend which parent she should live with. They could have recommended neither, and recommended care proceedings/foster care. However the threshold for that is very high. Children live with dangerous parents all the time where there is not enough evidence of risk of harm to remove them.

I am yet to meet a good social worker. - define "not good" - what do they do or not do that you think is wrong? Be precise.

It is like blaming doctors and nurses for NHS waiting lists. Of course there are bad ones here and there, but they can only do what they can do.

Child protection social work is not an exact science - it is based on judgement, which in itself is based on experience, which is based on proper supervision, which is based on proper trained supervisory staff, which is based on training, which is based on financial backing - all of which are lacking.

I have yet to meet a social worker who is not doing their very best within a flawed system. If we want something better, we as a society have to be prepared to both pay for it and provide moral support rather than endless blame. We need to back them up, shout for them, notice they exist rather than just pointing the finger when something goes wrong, spot when they do good (which they do).

I have had my own reasons to feel exasperated with social workers, but I am not making bland assumptions that they are all useless or do not care - I am looking at the values of our society which does not support them.

I have no doubt social workers fail their clients in many ways. But we are talking about a poorly paid, very difficult and complex job with an overwhelming workload, limited powers, and a level of public distrust from many who believe social services wish to remove children from their families.

Is it surprising that SS struggle to recruit and retain good staff, or that the staff they have struggle to achieve their goal of protecting children?

Really what is needed in a lot of these cases is less blame and vitriol and more understanding of the issues faced, training and resources.

Children are failed primarily by their parents. Some of these parents are violent, wicked and evil (I would put Sara Sharif's father in this category), but others are just deeply inadequate, stressed people often trying to raise children with inadequate resources and support in squalid conditions. This can often tip over into violence and abuse against children.

It must sometimes be hard for social services, looking in from the outside, to distinguish between the two types of family. And while clearly you'd hope that all children in the first category would be removed and safeguarded, it's less clear-cut in second category especially given the very limited resources social workers have.

Social workers aren't looking at kids saying "are these kids being parented well?" or "are these kids going to thrive?", they're looking at them saying "yes, this is awful parenting, but is the risk of harm so great that the child should be removed?" And that's a call that they're going to get wrong sometimes. The public emphasis afterwards should be less on vilifying them and more on missed warning signs and how to improve processes/communication to reduce the risk in future.

And remember the public also let Sara down as well. All those neighbours who didn't report what they were hearing. They may have had their reasons but, had they reported, that would have been more information to help social services get a fuller picture.

There is no mechanism to do that. I personally do not agree with home schooling with no local authority oversight but that's the law as it stands now.

Of course some parents are violent and some social workers make mistakes but the underlying problem is understaffing of social services by well trained social workers and that is caused by inadequate funding for which the Tories are largely responsible.

I have worked as a solicitor in local government, just a trainee including social services. Preparing cases for court was heart breaking. And I wasn’t meeting the children.

It was just after the Victoria Climbie report. The social workers and even us were so scared of what would happen if we didn’t get things right. Even as someone on the edges it exacerbated my depression. The judges also had the pressure. There has been things in previous posts about the paperwork- we were part of the pressure because even if a SW knew a situation was dangerous for a child without evidence the judge cannot decide to order that a child is removed.

Even then there weren’t enough social workers.
None of the successful cases are ever reported as they are quite rightly confidential, that leaves the dreadful ones.

Thank you to those of you doing the job now.

I wish someone knew how many children's lives are saved by social workers all of the time.
When the system fails it is horrendous and so sad and I can guarantee that destroys the social workers life too. None of us do it because we don't care about kids.

The court did this.

You are extremely naive if you think a SW placed SAra with her father ….that would have been the remit of the family courts…..SWs often disagree with court decisions…..but their hands are tied…they have to follow the law same as the rest of us

There's a vicious circle. Child protection needs very experienced and skilled workers. Unfortunately they are then put under so much pressure that they need to move on. The ones who stay often aren't as skilled or aren't as hard working. There's a revolving door of newly qualified social workers and the older hands have given up and moved elsewhere. People don't tend to stay in CP more than about 5 years because it is so hard- imagine going to work to children who have been raped, physically assaulted, neglected, exposed to heroin use egc every single day. And you try to seek legal advice and ask for permission to go to court or ask for funding and senior managers say no or the court refuses to remove. You have so many families you can't visit as regularly as you'd need to be able to be confident they're safe. And everyone speaks to you like shit and you work until 11pm and back on at 8am to try to make the kids a little bit safer.. its an impossible task. I'm a child protection conference chair.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Unfortunately I do meet many, on a daily basis. Across many different local authorities, I’m sorry but you cannot tell me my experience of social workers isn’t enough to base my opinion on. As I said I haven’t met social workers in just a professional capacity, I have had them involved throughout my childhood, and again I feel they didn’t even scratch the surface when it came to safeguarding me and my siblings. But again, that’s my experience so please do not try to dilute that, your experience and mine is obviously different.

they didn’t even scratch the surface when it came to safeguarding me and my siblings.

They can only do what they are legally permitted to do - their hands are tied.

OP as you know this area looking back what within the law at the time do you think they should have done. Did/do you think of doing it yourself as a career?

I'm sorry the services didn't get to the bottom of what was happening to you mamaxbear. it's fair enough to be angry about that and I can't imagine what it's like knowing workers are meant to help protect you and they don't.

Another children's social worker here. As a pp said you do not see the 1000s of children who are safeguarded every day up and down the country, we sadly only see the tiny minority when things go wrong. When things go wrong in safeguarding it is oftentimes absolutely catastrophic, but things in any system will always go wrong, especially in an overstretched, under resourced system. Sadly we will never stop people murdering other people, including children but there are things we can do to reduce the likelihood. Many (not all) of the parents who seriously intentionally hurt and harm their children have may be involved in drugs and alcohol misuse, have unmet mental health needs, domestic abuse, disturbed education journey etc and they often have experienced their own childhood trauma and didn't receive the right support to address this. Yes we can learn as a safeguarding system how to improve when these happen (note it isn't social workers sole responsibility) but if we really want to make change and reduce the likelihood of horrors like this happening we need much greater investment in preventative services for both adults and children's. But even with that caveat sadly we will never stop people killing all children.