Social worker power

[Babyonboardinthesticks]

...needs to be curbed. Also if cases in the press there should be more rights for social workers to publicise their own evidence to some extent too. Openness is more important than confidentiality sometimes. Justice needing to be seen to be done as much as done.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7052599.ece

It feels at times like the book 1984. You suspect if the state really wants to take your children they could come into any of our homes and find anything that every average parent has done and claim that's "abuse" and remove the child and that once you're in their clutches that's that.

We should let parents waive anonymity and set up web sites with access to all correspondence and reports.

"There is no way a child would have been placed on the register purely because her mother had told her she was born by a CS."

Depends how it was done. If mother shows childs her scar, and gives her the fluffy version of the story of how the doctors made a cut to take her out, as she was too big to get out the normal way, then no harm done.

If mother has a habit of shoving her scar in her child's face while screaming "YOU DID THIS TO ME YOU LITTLE BITCH! YOU DID IT! IT'S YOUR FAULT!" then that could be seen as damaging to the child.

As someone else pointed out further up the thread, a SS department that's in a mess anyway is likely to get massively overzealous after they've made a high-profile fuckup by not intervening.
And the biggest problem with SS/child protection does seem to be the way in which parents accused of abuse/neglect seem to have no way of defending themselves and no right to independent advocacy, which means that if/when they are being investigated by SW who are bad at their jobs (gullible newbies with little life experience who believe every lunatic pronouncement put out by 'experts' who have never even seen an actual child, or the sort of person who is attracted to social work because it's a good way to exercise power over others and feel superior) the situation escalates because the parents are frightened or angry and unable to be diplomatic.