My response to Dr Crippen's post on the moral outrage against social workers

Dr Crippen has a post about baby P in which he takes the rest of us to task for our collective desire to find a scpegoat and crucify a social worker in the baby P case:

It’s time, once again, to vent our collective spleens.

It’s time, once again, for those on the moral high ground to stand up and be counted.

It’s time, once again, to crucify a social worker.

I'm not going to fisk the post as I have made 2 long comments, 37 and 38, which I have copied here:

The moral outrage from the rest of us in cases like this is driven by frutration.

Frustration at our inability to protect children, despite the huge amount of tax payers money devoted to social services. Maybe not enough for those spending it, but it seems like a a hell of a lot to those of us paying it.

Frustration at the lack of mea culpa. Nobody seems to have ownership in cases like this. I don't believe that someone should necessarily be fired every time something goes wrong when events like these occur. However the lack of ownership by one person is probably the biggest factor whenever something so catastrophic and tragic happens in any walk of live. How can we learn if nobody has ownership?

Frustration at the iablity professionals to learn by past mistakes. Professionals are supposed to be experts in their field yet we hear cries for more supervision. Either they are drones who need supervision or they are professionals who can be trusted to call for help when they need it.

Frustration that, despite very good wages, managers lack the ability to manage. They can't see when something is going wrong and fix it before the problem gets so far out of hand. Thats what managers should be doing, not constantly supervising individual professionals but taking a wider view ensuring that systems and procedures are in place to catch the exceptions that lead to these hoorendous deaths.

Frustration to learn that yet again its a lack of communication that is the root cause, despite the £millions spent on IT and telecoms, hours spent in cross departmental meetings and the appointment of evermore coordinators.

Frustration that the "system" seems hell bent in keeping children in care rather than risk them going to live with people prepared to offer them a home, time, love and dedication because they might smoke. Frustration that we know that this will extend from one borough to the rest of the country and more children will suffer at the hands of self righteous indignation that people smoke.

Frustration that the standard response is yet more enquiries and reviews, which only seem to give those involved a chance to take one pace back with a "not my fault guv" shrug of their shoulders.

Frustration that despite all these enquiries we find that recommendations of the learned people who chair them are ignored by the Government and professionals, only for the same mistakes to be made again.

Frustration that whenever we raise our concerns we are told that we don't understand and should leave it to the professionals, only to see another child die in such distressing circumstances. Yet at the same time those same professionals are drawing up plans to give themselves power to remove overweight children from their parents and place them into a system that can be so broken that this child died.

So, Dr C, by all means point out that some of the moral outrage may be misplaced, but don't think for one minute that it isn't real or unwaranted.

And yes, if we never heard of another death we would ignore social service, but thats the point isn't it? Professionals want to be left alone to get on with their jobs while the rest of us go out and generate the wealth to pay for them?

Friday, November 14, 2008 4:33:00 AM

The Great Simpleton said...

Ok, so that's the general outrage dealt with and now this:
[my emphasis]

"You cannot legislate to eradicate evil. There is no system on earth that will protect us against Harold Shipman, Fred West, Peter Sutcliffe and all the rest of them. You do the best you can, in difficult circumstances. Some times you get it wrong. Haringay Council got it wrong this time. God, did they get it wrong and, yes, once again we need to examine procedures and see if we can get it any better.

But, once again, the whole emphasis of the story is on social services rather than on the evil thugs that committed the offence. It was the same with Victoria Climbie:"

Yes there are evil people but we know that, that's why we have set up social services and other specialists, to protect the vulnerable. That's why we give them special powers, so they can act to protect the vulnerable.

I agree that there will always be hard cases like Shipman and most people accepted that fact and looked to the subsequent enquiry to provide the recommendations that protect us from from future Shipmans. But if it happens again the moral outrage will be deafening, because yet again we will have found that professionals have becaome self righteous and compacent and unable to learn from past mistakes.

And that's the point with this moral outrage, as I said in my first comment, we've seen it all before.