Secret courts protect social workers not children...

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There may be a case for having secret courts - I can't right now think of what that case might be but someone made it and we have them. And if we are talking about being offended, then we should be offended by the government hiding behind children in order that we can't know what they are doing or saying.

A grandmother was hauled out of a comedy show and arrested on the orders of a family court judge – simply for hugging her granddaughter.

Kathleen Danby, 72, was sentenced in her absence to three months in jail by the secretive Court of Protection in April after a judge heard she embraced the vulnerable girl, 19, against the wishes of social services.

So, without any right to a defence or any warning an elderly woman has been sentenced to time in jail. I'm not concerned here with the merits or otherwise of the case but with the wrong that is imprisoning someone without their knowledge or them being able to defend themselves.

It seems to me that these cases - filled with people old and young who can't be named 'for legal reasons' - are an offence to justice. And the only beneficiaries from the secrecy are the social workers. The reason why secret courts exist is to allow social workers and other local authority staff to prosecute their actions free from scrutiny. As a local councillor - in theory a 'corporate parent' to these children social workers are 'protecting' through the secret court system - I am unable to challenge the work of those who, in theory, work for us 90 Bradford councillors.

The secrecy, protectiveness and evasiveness of social workers involved in these cases results in many people mistrusting - even fearing - social services. People make jokes that involve the social worker as some sort of bogeyman, a child snatcher who will drag little Johnny off kicking and screaming at the drop of a hat. And when you read reports such as the one above, it's easy to see how the prejudice of social workers and the courts destroys lives and wrecks families. It may all be for the best but we don't know and what little seeps out from the secret courts doesn't inspire confidence that they act in the interests of children rather than the interests of social workers and local councils.

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Cinderella's vengeance...

When the bridal couple walked into the church, the older sister walked on their right side and the younger on their left side, and the pigeons pecked out one eye from each of them. Afterwards, as they came out of the church, the older one was on the left side, and the younger one on the right side, and then the pigeons pecked out the other eye from each of them. And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness as long as they lived.

The fussbuckets of the children's services world appear to have won their campaign to allow the government to lock up parents who are emotionally cruel to their children:

Parents who fail to show love and affection towards their children could be sent to prison for up to 10 years under a “Cinderella Law” to be announced in the Queen’s Speech in June, according to a report.

The move will make “emotional cruelty” a criminal offence for the first time.

The decision was hailed as a “monumental step” forwards by a children’s charity, which said children could grow up with “ lifelong mental health problems” or end up taking their own lives.

There is only one question to ask here - who is deciding when being strict and brusque tips over into 'emotional cruelty'? The MP promoting the bill chooses the stigmatise step-parents (most of which do an OK job helping to bring up someone else's children) and uses the most pathetic appeal to emotion available - the fairy tale:

“Not too many years after the Brothers Grimm popularised the story of Cinderella, the offence of child neglect was introduced,” he said, but added: “Our criminal law has never reflected the full range of emotional suffering experienced by children who are abused by their parents or carers.

“The sad truth is that, until now, the Wicked Stepmother would have got away scot-free."

Now, as I remember it, the Wicked Stepmother's sin was to treat Cinders as a skivvy and not let her go to the ball. There's nothing in the tale to suggest that Cinderella was emotionally scarred by this treatment however egregious it was and however much the Wicked Stepmother favoured her own (famously ugly) daughters. I fail to see in this how locking up the Wicked Stepmother would have achieved anything? Would it have made Cinders' life better somehow? Or, more likely, would it have provided a little cruel schadenfreude for her as she jollied off into the sunset with the Prince!

Just as we have done with 'offence' where the police are close to being able to arrest people randomly for just saying stuff, with this new idea we hand the power to public agencies to seize children and lock up their parents for almost anything. There is no boundary to emotional or social cruelty, it is simply a judgement made by one flawed individual about another flawed individual.

And it hands real power to people who say things like this:

Sir Tony Hawkhead, chief executive of Action for Children, said he had met children who had been “scapegoated in their families, constantly humiliated and made to feel unloved”.

Think of the teenage girl screaming at Mum (or worse step-mum); "you don't love me, you don't care". Or the grunting young lad refusing to make eye contact with Dad (god forbid, Step-dad) for days on end because he turned off the football and insisted he did his homework.

Child protection authorities already have the powers they need to respond to children who are being damaged by their home environment. What we have here are people who don't just want to protect the children, they want to punish the parents.

This proposal isn't about child protection, it's about vengeance.And we don't need it.

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The ideology of social work: "we are all guilty"

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Michael Wharton, in his guise as Peter Simple, so often found his satire cropping up in real life. So it is with the mantra of Keinz Kiosk, psychologist -  "we are all guilty" he would cry as the audience stampeded for the exits. However, this collective sin sits at the heart of much soft left thinking and damages society in being so.

At a time here in Bradford when we must look to our practice and policies around child protection for all the wrong reasons, the idea that there is nothing wrong with the training, management and development of social workers must be challenged. So I am cheered when Michael Gove, as the responsible minister says:

"In too many cases, social work training involves idealistic students being told that the individuals with whom they will work have been disempowered by society. They will be encouraged to see these individuals as victims of social injustice whose fate is overwhelmingly decreed by the economic forces and inherent inequalities which scar our society."

This isn't to deny inequality or to say that the inconsistency of our education system doesn't result in inadequate parents. It is to change the focus away from the idea that social workers should not judge the actions of their clients.

As the health and achievement of many families demonstrates being poor simply isn't a precursor to dysfunction. However, we have rather got use to the idea of using poverty as an excuse or explanation for dysfunction. For all that each tragic child protection case is different, recent cases have a depressing similarity - not simply the presence of broken families, drugs and alcohol but the apparent failing of seeing a starving child and assuming poverty rather than neglect or abuse.

We are not all guilty, people are not poor because others are rich and Britain is a generous nation - collectively and individually. So when social workers see that starving child, they should perhaps ask themselves whether the fault lies with a neglectful parent rather than an unequal society.

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Hamzah Khan: what we're told...

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...does seem a little complacent. I will await the publication of the Serious Case Review before drawing any judgement about the case. But this first comment to us Councillors from the Council worries me:

That report (the Serious Case Review) will be published in the next few weeks but I can advise you that there was limited involvement from statutory agencies in this case as mum did not want to take up offers of help and no serious concerns were reported to the statutory agencies. This is not a case where lots of agencies were involved and didn’t see the signs, the question is how can this happen and professionals, neighbours, communities not be aware of it.

It also seems to me that the Council are preparing the ground for any response to the serious case review - indeed Cllr Berry's press statement indicates just this:

Serious case reviews lead to learning and action to make children safer, in our district and across the country

Maybe they do but the public would like those reviews to lift the lid on failings and to see those responsible held accountable. Is that not too much to ask?

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It's not care, it's neglect...

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So we take a child "into care". Most often this is quite right and proper (although the secrecy behind the process makes it more-or-less impossible to know which taking of a child is good and which egregious) but then we put many of these youngsters in homes.

And quite frankly, three square meals aside, that's not much of an improvement:

The NSPCC has warned that children in residential homes are three times more likely to go missing than other youngsters as figures revealed that nearly 3,000 children repeatedly disappeared from care last year. 

I'm sure that these are 3,000 differently tragic cases and that social workers are struggling under a mountain of paperwork and an avalanche of stupid rules - not to mention ideas such as being "non-judgemental" that damn children to not knowing what is good or bad behaviour. But yet again it indicates just how poor our care system has become as a result of the laissez faire parenting approach mandated by the law and by the ideology of social work.

But this doesn't excuse the person in charge of Bradford system saying this:

“Some of the ‘missing reports’ are in relation to young people staying out overnight – something that all teenagers can be prone to.” 

Did your children ever stay out overnight without you knowing where they were, who they were with and that there were responsible adults present?

This attitude entirely sums up why we have a problem - it is not care, it is neglect.

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Culture and adoption....

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Much excitement over the case of what seems to be blatant political bias in a child protection case in Rotherham.  And there is an oddity in all this around culture and the manner in which we treat its significance during child protection cases. Indeed, it does seem that this is the central reason for the decision that Rotherham took in that they:

"...were severely criticised by the courts in terms of not meeting their cultural and ethnic needs."

And because UKIP has been critical of inward migration from East Europe, the council took the children away from the UKIP supporting foster parents. The rest - emergency placement, crass comments about UKIP's policies and so forth - is just spin (albeit bad spin).

We should also note that the parliamentary by-election in Rotherham provides great cover for the Labour politician who leads on Children & Families - under the daft 'purdah' rules council press during elections doesn't allow for politicians to be quoted or featured.

The interesting bit in all this, however, relates to what we understand by the term 'multi-cultural' or 'multiculturalism'. It does seem that the default social work interpretation is for 'cultural and ethnic needs' to be met through preference for a placement in the same culture. This seems to me more akin to apartheid than 'multiculturalism'. Surely in a multicultural society placements should be blind to the culture of the foster parent but attuned to the need for children to 'access' their birth culture.

It is this that worries me and, indeed, the manner in which the courts have pontificated on 'cultural and ethnic needs' without asking what that might mean in practice. With the result that we trip into the left-wing mind set of the social worker - UKIP are 'extreme right wing' ergo UKIP are racist. And the result of this is that some kids lives are messed about, a good couple (in the true meaning of that term) are upset and po-faced council folk litter the airwaves with obfuscatory explanations for their crass decisions.

The first question we should be asking in child protection is around safety not culture or ethnicity. And the second question we should ask in about stability but culture or ethnicity. Only once the child is in a safer and more stable place should we be considering culture and ethnicity. It appears that this is not the case - culture and ethnicity are made paramount and children are suffering for this reason.

Finally an observation. Would it not have been refreshing if the Council Director had said something like:

We got this wrong and can only apologise for the upset caused. Of course we shouldn't make fostering decisions on the basis of potential foster parents' political opinions. We will be speaking to the social workers responsible to ensure that this doesn't happen again and I will be personally visiting the couple concerned to express our sincere apologies.

Not going to happen though is it!

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