'snatched' by social workers

[DuelingFanjo]

oh ffs

I know it's the Daily Mail but Social workers don't snatch children!

She looks good for 48 mind!

wow Groundhog day.

John Hemmings you said:

'Let us understand the reality of what happens at times. I had a phone call today at about 5.30pm. This was from a mother whose two children have been taken into care mainly because her mother (the grandmother) called the social worker fat.

This is pure evil. The fact that the judiciary tolerate it and that parents' solicitors often roll over and play dead in order to pay their mortgages is fundamentally wrong.'

you are an absolute and total tool. This kind of stuff is the worst kind of scaremongering nonsense. I note you did not engage with my criticisms of you on an earlier thread, just as you have not dealt with the criticisms by senior members of the judiciary about your approach.

You are a disgrace to your profession. the situation you describe is pure fantasy. The problem is that lots of people want to believe it. do you not consider for one moment the damage you are doing to a system already under great strain and pressure.

No, of course you don't.

WahWah - I have been trying to stay off this thread because I can no longer stand all these people who nothing of how the cp system works but are arrogant enough to make all sorts of criticisms of social workers and the courts etc. As for JH now I KNOW he is mad, quite quite mad, by posting that children were taken into care because their grandmother called the social worker fat. I think this statement from him proves what I have been trying to say all along, and as yu say he prints nonsense, utter nonsense and I think as an MP this is wholly irresponsible.

Anyway thanks for your support.

I think the time has now come to make representations about John Hemmings to who ever he is accountable to. does anyone know who this might be?

he is a lib dem MP I think. I am printing this thread out and writing to Nick Clegg.

He has got to be stopped. People take him seriously because he's an MP and I think he is therefore very dangerous.

Hear Hear Spero. What can be done about this man - any ideas?

Spero: But some people in the 'caring' professions are spiteful fuckups. 20 years ago there were childrens' homes crawling with paedohiles, and there has been at least one DV thread fairly recently on MN where the abuser worked in mental health care and there was suggestions that he might be abusing patients - some people go into the caring professions in order to have an accessible pool of victims while at the same time getting their egos stroked by other people thinking how wonderfully 'caring' they are. To a lesser extent, nasty bullying little ego trippers take on such jobs as well because they love having power over others and tend to think (not always wrongly) that the 'professional' will be believed over the dysfunctional, poorly-educated, young, impoverished 'client'.
Of course there are lots of social workers, care workers etc who are wonderful, compassionate, sensible, overworked and undervalued. But it is very important to keep on insisting that 'authorities' are accountable for their behaviour

Spero - our posts crossed. Yes he is a LibDem MP for Yardley in Birmingham. I would be happy to support you in exposing the dangerousness of this man. I have only been using MN for a few months but on any thread involving social workers or adoption he posts nonsense. I had considered writing to Nick Clegg myself some weeks ago but didn't get around to it. I had collated some of his nonsensical posts which may be useful to quote to Nick Clegg, so maybe we could get in touch by e mail to discuss the way forward.

So this social worker was just merrily walking down the street and along comes granny and says "that social worker is fat," and the social worker thought "oh, I'll take that granny's grandchildren into care for that." No thought not. SS will have been involved with the family for a reason, to state that a social worker took children into care purely because of one remark is just rubbish.

I can totally see that many ss departments are failing and that mistakes are made.

But I think it's quite scary that seemingly inteligent people are listening to and believing this hysterical bullshit.

Well, he hasn't even been slowed down by Wall LJ making extremely serious criticisms of him after he accused a solicitor of manufacturing an entire case file, with no evidence whatsoever.

The newspapers won't be interested as if they were to lose their quota of 'Evil Social Workers snatched my Kid' stories, then all they will have left is Jordan and Peter Andre.

No one on these kind of threads is really interested either.

Last time I offered to take people to court with me so they could see what REALLY happens, just how seriously everyone takes it, just how many mountains of paperwork we go thru, just how many assessments of useless drug addicts are carried out at tax payers expense....

The Bar council are ok with it as long as I let everyone else know who is involved in the court hearing and get their permission.

One person emailed me to say they were interested and I heard nothing back.

But this lack of willingness to be informed is really, really dangerous. In a few years we will end up with NO ONE being prepared to act in child protection social work. Children will die or be left to grow up in filth, squalor and violence.

i'm not saying SW are perfect, of course not. But calling a SW fat is NOT grounds for a care order, no court would permit this. How JH can listen to this crap and repeat it as truth. Sad, sorry man.

Solidgold - agree with every word you said. But that isn't really the point.

JH et al slag off a system based on nonsense. Which lots of people are only too keen to believe. This is really damaging.

Yes Nina, please contact me, i would like to do whatever I can, I am boiling over with rage again at all of this. email me at phillimore sarah @ hotmail.com

LOL at the SWs getting their knickers in a twist about the fat thing. JH isn't saying that the official reason for a child being taken into care is that the SW was called fat. But that that was the deciding factor in the SW's decision to use the machinery of the state against the family.

I have several friends who are police officers. Quite often they admit, the difference between whether they bother to arrest someone or not and pin an offence on them (such as a public order offence) is how polite and reasonable the person is with them, whether they've had a row or sex with their wife that day, whether they have PMT, what mood they're in etc. Because they're human. Which is why sometimes you will get away with calling a police officer a fascist pig, and sometimes you will find yourself up before the beak. Are you all really suggesting that SW's are not as human as other people? That they are immune to the provocations and irritations that they come into contact with and absolutely never take a course of action depending on a) their mood and b) the responses of the other human being with which they are dealing?

jhemmings, you really have exposed yourself with your laughable assertion.

So did this case go to court? Did the judiciary agree that calling a social worker fat is grounds for taking children into care?

I see the usual suspects are all too willing to believe every pathological lie you utter. You are in a position of power and influence but I expect as usual you'll never be able to substantiate what you say. Disgraceful

Yes there was dittany. aren't you cutting and pasting your posts from that thread on here?
I know you didn't think social workers were giving a good impression then either. Oh well..

To those of you posting on this thread who are social workers:

How on earth do you know that some of your collegues in other parts of the country are not making terrible errors and breaking the law

How could you possibly know?

I have a profession - and I would never proclaim to dismiss out of hand if someone was claiming that they knew that my fellow professionals were causing problems. I know that I do my job well but cannot comment on other people and situations which I don't know about.

I do not have any personal knowledge or anecdotal knowledge of social services or family courts. I have a horrible fear that things go terriblly wrong in many cases. I grew up in the NE and my Mum along with all the other Mums she knew were completely terrified that one of their children would fall ill and have to go to that hospital. People knew that a terrible mistake was being made long before the enquiry etc.

I think that it is 100% common sense that there must be transparancy over these procedings. Fine call the child in court Child A, parents B and C - but allow the facts to be reported on whilst preserving the anonymity of the people.

The balance of belief must be with the parents. This means that as a society we must accept that we should strive for :

• no children being taken into care/adpoted unecessarily/ in error

unfortunately this will indirectly lead to

• some children who should be taken into care will not be and some will sadly be injured or some may even (tragically) die.

We should remember that it is not social services fault if a parent is violent/abusive - SS are not responsible for the parents behaviour.

As a society, however sad we all were about the Baby P case we should not allow that feeling to manifest itself as a over zealous social services system.

Tabouleh. I don't think you'll find one social worker on here who is saying mistakes aren't made. They clearly are.

dittany no ones shooting the messenger they are just objecting to jh's fantastical musings about care proceedings resulting from calling a social worker fat. Even you must find that a bit difficult to believe?

As for following your posts-um a tad grandiose of you but yes I do remember your posts on that thread.

Only one social worker was called fat. The case is in court today. Of course the official reason will not be that.

Yes last time Nananina had a team of social workers who were writing a joint letter to Nick Clegg.

I am surprised they are not trying to get me banned from Mumsnet.

I follow cases in considerable detail. This includes assisting people to get through the courts to Strasborg.

Spero would have no hope in the Strasbourg court trying to argue a case by using insults.

My argument in the RP case in the court of appeal was that a document which had an impossible date and no received stamp was retrospectively inserted in a case file. Not that a whole case file was manufactured.

I did not argue who did it.

The issue of the obiter dicta of the LJs is trundling through the system and should pop out somewhere soon.

It is interesting how many practitioenrs here when presented with an argument use ad hominem attacks rather than dealing with the argument itself.

Your mum was a social worker, but you aren't?

Right, fairenoughsky, anyone want to ask me about oncology? My mum used to be an oncology nurse. I'm not one though....

Oh don't be silly. A run down of what's involved (and more importantly what's NOT involved) when having to remove children from parents is much easier explained than how to be an oncologist.

The two things are totally different. My point is, as you well knw, that snatching children is not even possible for a social worker.

The fat story sounds odd to me and I would want to know more first.

I believed the absolutely insane things that were said and done by SWs in the Orkney, Rochdale and Shieldfield cases, because I had read evidence (such as transcript of court proceedings), but I wouldn't have believed it just on somebody's say so.

So as far as I am concerned, this fat story will have to be a case of Innocent until proved guilty.

A bit like when one of my children comes home and says the teacher did something totally outrageous. I won't dismiss it out of hand out of some bizarre conception that teachers can never be outrageous (I've been around teachers all my life and know better!)- but I would want to hear the other side about any one incident before I made up my mind because I also know that stories can get distorted by an interested party.

"Let us understand the reality of what happens at times. I had a phone call today at about 5.30pm. This was from a mother whose two children have been taken into care mainly because her mother (the grandmother) called the social worker fat."

On the basis of one phone call you would be really quite stupid to make the assumptian that this was 'mainly because her mother called the social worker fat. For the children to have been taken in to care the family would have had to have gone through a lot longer process than a social worker arriving and being called fat.

"This is pure evil"

Oh dear. You are now judging cases on if actions are 'evil' or not. How very tabloid of you

"johnhemming - are you seriously telling us you believe that children were taken into care because their grandmother called a social worker fat?"

he is. Oh that and the fact that they are evil!

The problem is that both sides on these threads are adopting what seems to me like a tabloid approach.

NanaNina claiming that all journalists are unreliable and don't care about the truth and John Hemming taking the fat story at face value. They're neither of them giving me an enhanced view of their profession tbh.

The approach that children cannot be taken into care wrongly has clearly been proved wrong- and any social worker who pretends only vaguely to remember that there may have been such cases loses all her credibility in my eyes. The rest of the adult population remember perfectly clearly what were some of the main news stories of the 90s as well as recollecting the later scandals of this decade. To have blotted these things out of your mind when they concern your own profession seems somewhat unlikely.

Otoh this says nothing about the likelihood of any one incident being unjust. It is not proof that for instance the fat incident is true. Unless we could prove that the cases of unreliable SWs are not matched by a number of unreliable parents. And I think we'd have difficulties proving that one.

The best we can do is to try to keep an open mind about any one case. And this is why it is so scary to see people on these threads who are engaged in these cases in a professional capacity (and yes, I'm referring to both sides) who do not appear to have an open mind.

Keeping an open mind and judging each individual case would be a balanced approach and there are posters here who do try to argue for that. But I notice that we are not the ones that get thanked for representing the voice of reason.

Spero Thu 03-Dec-09 23:20:08
"I think the time has now come to make representations about John Hemmings to who ever he is accountable to. does anyone know who this might be?

he is a lib dem MP I think. I am printing this thread out and writing to Nick Clegg.

He has got to be stopped. People take him seriously because he's an MP and I think he is therefore very dangerous."

This seems to me an odd understanding of what politicians do. He is accountable to the electorate is the simple answer. It is his job to propound his views, whether of the failures of the social care system or the iniquities of capitalist economy, and it is then up to the electorate to decide whether they want to elect a man with these views. Democracy can't work any other way.

cory, the voice of reason