Social Worker Tribunal

[Manderleyagain]

Tribunaltweets are reporting from a social worker's fitness to practice tribunal. They are not naming the social worker - just initials RM. I believe the case has been discussed here before but as they are not naming I won't find old threads.

mobile.twitter.com/tribunaltweets/status/1581922786204753920L

Social Work England found against her for criticising mermaids and putting other gender critical posts on her Facebook. There were no complaints about her actual work. She is now having a fitness to practice hearing but SWE, a few days before the hearing, decided not to defend their decisions. It sounds like they are applying to withdraw allegations.
SWE's barrister is Robin White.

Anyway, point taken on the fact swe do not themselves conduct family interviews but they regulate those who do.

I still believe that any group which regulates workers regularly involved in very emotional interviews should be capable of conducting such interviews themselves as well I.e. independent interviews without fear or favour according to the regulation as it currently stands not how some want it to be...

No I agree that really boiled my piss. It was the very height of bad taste. Unfortunately because she was defending her none roll in the b fiasco she was found to have not done anything wrong.

I don't have a problem if she wants to comment on threads that aren't cases she is working on. I'm sure on other threads I'd find her posts interesting and a welcome addition to the thread. But when it's threads about the cases she is employed on then that just feels grubby and so very wrong and unprofessional. It also comes across as intimidating. Like look we can find you wherever you hide. Now you would think RMW would have realised this by now and thought you know what I'll stay away from commenting on threads involving cases I'm working on, but no not Robin. She just doubles down.

This is a really important point

Along with schools that are very complicit in transitioning young children and not flagging any of it in the way that they would other potentially ethically troubling circumstances. When you look at how Fabricated Induced Illness presents there are many parallels for eg and the consideration of potential harm should come first and foremost

Given the interim Cass Report, the statement from the ACP today, the lack of finding from SWE against this SW, the Forster ruling, the exposure of the lack of safeguarding (and potentially much worse) around Mermaids....

Professionals involved in the care, education, safeguarding and support of young people need to critically analyse their own beliefs, judgements, biases and experiences and look for the best evidence for decision making. They also need to be able to defend that decision making and to be able to demonstrate 'best interests' thinking at all times.

Professional bodies need to be not only aware of the changing landscape here, and of the rapidly evolving legal clarity but they should be ahead of it, asking for it and accurately appraising their members of it.

I suspect it motivates some extra gardening, so not all bad!

Oooh! I just looked it up and it turns out, I don’t need to be a barrister to have an opinion as it’s based on public perception!

And us Mumsnetters are pretty much the modern day equivalent of the man on the Clapham omnibus, hence such enormous political, media and commercial interest in our opinions. Much cheaper to check in with Mumsnet than run a focus group.

Quite a few interesting bits and bobs in this pdf of the Bar Standards Board.

www.barstandardsboard.org.uk/uploads/assets/f0d114af-9c5a-4be4-9dbffa9f80b1e47f/8c50a665-79ee-4bfa-b36eb5c138798d72/Part-2-Code-of-Conduct18092019092228.pdf

From the guidance section gC26 & gC16 seem relevant and gC24 seems pertinent in relation to Sarah’s thread?

and of course c12 covers those of us who have been dismissively referred to as ‘gender crit’ this evening.

I would’ve thought a barrister would be careful to always use person-inclusive phrasing, eg ‘people with gender critical beliefs’ just as we try to always use ‘transgender person’ rather than use ‘transgender’ as a noun, which would be (rightly) perceived as dehumanising.

I’m not sure I’ve added it up correctly so I would appreciate a second pair of eyes on this

rC8, rC9, rC12 = possible breeches of CD3, CD5 & CD8?

Have I missed any?

Also, like others have said, using the term ‘gender crits’ is dehumanising. Are feminists ‘critters’ to anyone using the abbreviation ?

Do those posters understand that if anyone referred to trans people as ‘the transes’ or just ‘transes’ they would be deleted because that is various degrees of dehumanising people?

And rightly so to that they should be deleted on these boards. We all follow talk guidelines and using derogatory shortenings like this at the very least should be considered uncivil.

It is quite remarkable to see how some posters refer to people who don’t believe that gender identity should be prioritised above sex where sex matters. We see a number of versions : ‘the GCs’ or just GCs, and now ‘crits’. All seek to dehumanise people who feel that in some instances sex should be prioritised to make it is easier to discredit them at the very least, or at worst to monster them in various ways.

The irony here is that RMW is a professional, governed by a professional standards code, commenting on a case in which they were involved in attempting to find against a professional citing breach of THEIR professional standards code.

One of the reasons that whole case was dropped was based on the mitigation that the professional did not identify themselves publicly as a professional of that genre when commenting not-publicly.

Yet, here we have the legal professional, also bound by a code of conduct, loudly and persistently identifying themselves as a professional bound by that code while commenting very publicly in a really unprofessional way.

What's the mitigation here?

I have literally no shits to give about your gender identity but I find your posting on cases you're involved in inexplicable. Your tone is really unpleasant and your dismissal of anyone with any criticism of you or your cases as a <insert offensive generalisation/acronym/insult here> is not helpful.

When you create and display comments to or about you, do you pay them alongside your posts too?

That you seen not a single other professional posting as you do, that not one of your colleagues in any of those other cases have popped up here with you, that you see no commenting on social media from say an arresting policemen in a criminal case, or the coroner in death report should give you pause for thought and reflection.

It's Robin's deleted post on an old thread, about a particular protected characteristic, that was at best ill-thought out (I am charitably assuming RMW does not explicitly hold views on this group of people), that have largely determined my views of Robin. I do wish everyone here would not expend so much energy and server space on someone who has only this sort of thing to contribute.

Going back to this case, I wonder how long it will be before the judgement is published. I really want to understand how they dealt with the apparent lack of new evidence. Was a different justification given for allowing them to discontinue, or did they accept that the info was new to swe?

I get why the panel would allow the case to be dropped. There's an argument that no public interest is served by continuing when the regulator doesn't want to and there is no chance of finding against the social worker. But it's so annoying not to have the whole thing laid bare.

I have literally no shits to give about your gender identity but I find your posting on cases you're involved in inexplicable.

It's not inexplicable - everyone falls over themselves to engage with Robin, which is the reason for posting.

So tempted to start chucking the word “defensive” around to see if it gets the same response as all those other adjectives.😁 I know it can’t be nice to be a running joke to an online forum, but this is the worst possible way to deal with it.

Anyway, why did Social Work England withdraw their accusations? Was it because of Mermaids imploding? I hope the TRAs involved in the case enjoyed their helping of crow. May it be the nth of many.

The outcome document has been published here www.socialworkengland.org.uk/umbraco/surface/hearingdetails/details/3170

RMW was born a male, XY chromosomes , I thought?

Am I wrong?

(And yes, this will probably be deleted and yes I'll probably get a strike for posting it.)

@Feministwoman

You are not wrong. 🤐😑

Robin, thank you for reminding me & others to donate to both this case and Sarah’s case.
Keep on going as you are peaking more women with every comment.

Bravo Ms Phillimore!’

I also would love to have a deeper understanding of the conversations that led to the SWE change of tack.

@robinmoirawhite can you shed any light on who first proposed that SWE were going to be made look like donkeys against Naomi C? Were the discussions all done outside the office and a decision endorsed, in the French style, or is there a written document trail that explains to the potential witnesses the sort of questions they might have to answer under oath, knowing that their answer will be subject to publication in various newspapers and weekly publications.

Only because you are quite open, did you advise them to quietly make this go away in the hope of preserving their reputation , or did you advise them that their case was winnable?

Robin, people write about you on mumsnet not because you are trans, but because you regularly pop up making pompous posts about yourself, and delivering weaselly replies that fail to address the visible issues with safeguarding and the medical treatment of children in gender identity ideology. Not to mention you posting on a thread by someone you were professionally involved in a case against.

HTH.

The outcome document has been published here www.socialworkengland.org.uk/umbraco/surface/hearingdetails/details/3170

grr, the website is down and I only got the chance to skim it before. But my memory is that it was really weird. The “new information” only supplemented everything she (the targeted social worker) had said before. For example, there were extra character references and these were labelled as “new information.” Even though the character references she’d already given them were good! It didn’t seem like “new information” by any reasonable definition of the term.

Is there any information available on the timeline of this case? At what point did SWE decide to withdraw their allegations? I still suspect it was to do with her being proven right about “the charity M.”

Thanks for the link to the judgement. The panel accepted that the extra references from colleagues, and the context for the screen shots were enough 'new' info, though the fact RM's Facebook was private was already known.

I hope the discrimination case goes all the way to court because I want to know more about the crappy process. I wonder what opportunities she had to provide context & explanation? They didn't try to find out what this was all about, and just went on screen shots given by the complainant. But even screen shots would have obviously been mostly articles from the papers. I always wondered if there was something nasty, but no, it really was just sharing news articles & campaign groups like fpfw during a government consultation to her 40 fb friends.

I remember that she initially accepted the charges and wrote a reflective piece saying she had changed her views, and went on lgbtqi+÷=× training. But I think she has a really strong case for belief discrimination, and that could was her employer/regulator treating her belief as necessarily morally wrong, and trying to make her adopt a different set of beliefs.

The time line is in the judgement when it comes back. No mention of mermaids obviously. From memory swe were still defending it in July 2022, then Sarah phillimore/RM's response to that was submitted September 2022, and swe withdrew the case in Oct 2022.

I am hopeful that that the discrimination suit will throw up more detail from internal communication about RM, but as they already know that's happening I imagine they've kept anything juicy off digital. I wonder if they will try and settle now.

Reminder please that veg is needed for this allotment.

I don’t really understand the character reference bit. If you’ve done something bad enough that there is a question mark over whether or not you should be practising, why would a character reference make a difference? Just because a colleague had never seen you acting unprofessionally doesn’t mean you didn’t act unprofessionally. I can’t work out why a character reference would be relevant at this stage of proceedings.

I’ve just donated to RM on crowdjustice , thanks for the reminder ladies.

That document is quite a read!

Great mention of Mermaids there .

"70. The panel concluded that it was not appropriate, or proportionate, in the
circumstances of this case to issue an advice or warning to Ms Meade and decided to take no further action."