Tuesday 2 February 2010

Frank Thoughts #2: Why Social Workers are Bad

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"We'll never solve society's problems so long as there are social workers in the way. Why should they sort people's lives out? They'd all be out of a job!"

Editors note: These Frank thoughts are all comments and observations made by my father, Frank Cooke, over the years.

2 comments:

David Chiverton said...

Genius

SaltedSlug said...

Ah, that's right; I was going to comment wasn't I?

They do get a rough time of it these social workers. Bloggers (armed with today's dose of 'Mail) are often either criticising them for not doing enough(Baby P), or lambasting them for doing too much("they just like splitting up families").

Whenever I put the question of whether everyone agrees that social workers are actually needed, everyone goes all quiet.

Case in point recently was the anger about those Fife SWs trying to take that kid off it's teenage mum because she was too thick to look after it. Now, bearing in mind we only ever have the Mail/Express take on this, I'm sceptical that we ever have anything like the full facts on any of these cases.

As a pertinent example, before now Mrs Slug (as a childcare solicitor) has encountered a parent who was so stupid she literally could not understand the concept of her baby needing feeding.
So I didn't find that Fife case all that shocking.

Maybe they were being draconian and nasty in Fife, or the rules and threshold criteria may be different in Scotland, but we only ever get half a story (unless the child is killed/horribly abused, in which case the papers can't report enough awful details).

Probably bad form to write a comment several times as long at the OP, but it's as good a place as any.