Anyone who has followed Bunglie's saga will know how frightening social services practise towards some parents can be. Hopefully not in every case, but the attitude of professionals towards mothers accused of harming their children left/leaves a lot to be desired in terms of objectivity and evidence-gathering.
Today's Mail takes this onto new ground. I'd already heard from my sister, who works in this field, examples of parents with learning difficulties being treated as 'guilty until proved innocent' in terms of their capacity to look after their own children.
In p. 8 & 9 today's Mail carries a story on social workers removing children from people with learning difficulties. They include an opinion piece by Prof Tim Booth, prof social policy at Sheffield who has some interesting things to say about discrimination by soc. services: '[this is] a form of abuse by the system whereby people are made worse off by the services that are supposed to help them. It is rampant, pervasive and destructive of family life, and far more prevalent than ... child abuse. ...system abuse, more than child abuse, is the precipitating factor behind the high rates of child removal.'
Together with the Government's policy to 'encourage' all mothers of young children back to work whether they want to or not, and proposals for massive database storing information about all our children (and sparking social services investigations if two 'red flags' are raised - like a health visitor saying a baby is 'not gaining enough weight' and a later trip to A&E because the same child falls out of a tree), I'm very worried. It seems the Government is, whether deliberately or not, undermining the private sphere of family life and turning itself into the childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
What do you think?