Cory - I don't disagree with what you say in your last post. Of course we all have a right to make our views known in the way you describe. The thing is though that criticims of any system, to be valid, need to be based on fact and the vast majority of criticisms on here are not based on fact. They are based on what people think happens, what they have read, or seen on TV, or heard from someone else. This is my what I am trying to challenge.
The criticisms of social work intervention in child protection are in my view based on the myth that social workers have the power to remove children on very dubious grounds, that they are insensitive to birth parents, they want to win in court, want to get children adopted to meet the targets, want to take children from decent parents whilst leaving others with parents who might harm them, and the judges merely "rubber stamp" social work decisions. Now if you believe that then I can see only too well why people will feel as they do about social workers, but I'm sorry this is NOT what happens. On another thread (if anyone is interested) I think it was the one about the GCSC I posted at length, itemising everything that has to happen before a child can be removed and after that has taken place. There was not a single comment about the content of that post other than derogatory comments about my tone or the length of the post or somesuch. I was in posting at such length honestly trying to demonstrate to posters exactly does happen in care proceedings, rather than what people believe happens.
I DO know that there have been some miscarriages of justice in the past. Dittany is for ever banging on about the MSBY debacle and she is right - medical evidence was given that was accepted by the court when it proved to be unsafe. There have been other cases that people have cited in Cleveland and the Orkneys, and these cases involved suspicion about sexual/ritualised abuse. Certainly in Cleveland it was distorted medical evidence at the root of the problem. In Orkney I think there was a totally inappropriate belief about satanic abuse which was never proven and YES mistakes were made. However these cases were many years ago and lessons have been learned. The 1989 Children Act came about more or less as a direct result of Cleveland and was the most comprehensive legislation related to children in the history of child care. In all professions, mistakes are made but to keep on using these things from the past to try to prove that children are "snatched" and adopted away from decent parents is I'm afraid simply not the case. JH is I think responsible for a lot of distorted information on here, and of course we now know he is driven by what happened to him personally but that doesn't make it any better that he is persisting in his quest to try to discredit all social work activity in relation to child protection.
To return to having a voice about public services, yes I often talk about the NHS with friends/relatives who work in the system and I have a son and dil and friends who are teachers. I have a friend who is a lawyer and another an accountant. I am happy to discuss with them in broad terms the nature of their jobs and by listening to them I learn more about the problems/frustrations for them of working in these organisations. However what I would not dream of doing is criticising say a lesson plan produced by a teacher, a way in which a nurse treated a patient, the way in which a lawyer represented her client or the way in which an accountant balanced the books (so to speak) simply because I do NOT have anything like enough information to make any of these kind of assertions. Indeed I would think it extremely arrogant of me if I tried to do so.
Does that make any sense at all.