UK Social Services - Should Face Prosecution?

Why are social workers not held accountable for the decisions they take. If a pilot or train drivers causes an accident they can be held accountable for manslaughter. Why in this country billions or pounds are spent and these people are supposed to have the best training in the world fail to spot child neglect. Two high profile cases today, a four year old child and a 18 month old baby dead the little one had a broken back. Both children had been on the at risk register but nothing was done to save them as the social workers did not want to risk upsetting the families. Its about time everyone said we have had enough and started making these department accountable for children that die whilst on a social workers case load. They never seem to get it right ever. Makes me weep jasmine Beckford, Victoria Climbe and many many others and still the same mistakes get made. We learn and do nothing, The NSPCC should be shouting from the rooftops earning their charity money

UK Social Services - Should Face Prosecution?
I hope you trully understand the position that social workers are in. Removal of a child from a home is a very traumatic experience for everyone involved. You have crying, screaming children and hysterical adults. It is not a situation to enter into lightly and it is only done as a last resort. From your statements, you seem to think that the decision to remove a child from a home is an easy one. In some situations, the choice actually is pretty easy, but often times, things are not so clear. To compare the job of social worker to that of a pilot or train driver is ludicrous. These people work with machinery, and social workers work with human beings, which are far more unpredictable and hard to figure out than any machine, and often times parents are good at hiding what they have done. (BTW, I'm not trying to belittle pilots and drivers, they just aren't comparable to social workers). Try putting yourself in their shoes, you easily dismiss "the risk of upsetting the families" as if that has no bearing on anything. Just remember that these families have rights and often times the parents do love their children. In addition, the social services agency is exposed to legal action every time they remove a child. It really is a no-win situation. You say that "they never seem to get it right." Well, do you know how many people are served by your local social services. Probably not, and you never will, because you never hear about those people that are served successfully, you only hear about the small percentage of cases that go wrong.





That said, the workers involved in the specific case should be scrutinized to see if they could have acted more appropriately with the information they had at the time. Hopefully, your local social services agency can learn from this and apply it to future cases.





Edit: I reading my answer again a few hours later, I regret using the term "ludicrous." I really didn't mean to come off so negative. My apologies.
Reply:I think it all goes back to the Scottish case - was it in the '80s? - where several families had their children taken away because of scurrilous rumours about them being Satan-worshippers. In that case, social workers took away the children of innocent people and put them into care.





Since that major screw-up, social services has taken a "softly-softly" approach - which IMHO is the wrong thing to do!





Sure, they are overworked. The government needs to put more resources into the problem. It squanders so much money on tax breaks for the rich, especially foreigners and hedge funds (who end up paying NO taxes on their vast wealth in this country) that it could be devoting to saving innocent children.





Shame on this government!
Reply:i live where letica was first put on the high risk register and social servies here are horrid i have reported a child that is still getting metally abused but it still is abused and social servies said its malious gossip other people also have reported this woman 2 but she still has the child there is more 2 this but would take 2 long on here what i saying its still going on and we on here havent got a clue
Reply:It wasn't the social workers who killed these children - or Jasmine Beckford, or Victoria Climbie or any of the other poor children who have met their deaths at the hands of those who should have loved them most.





I take you are assuming that the Social Workers "didn't want to risk upsetting the families" because I haven't seen any evidence of that in the reports I have read and it doesn't sound likely to me.





If the Social Workers in these most recent cases acted below the standard that they should have, then of course, they should be held accountable. On the other hand, if the system in which they worked did not allow them to do the job they could have then it should be changed.





But never forget who is finally to blame for these children's deaths.
Reply:Social workers do not make decisions based on whether a family would be upset or not. If they did, they are in the wrong job.


Unfortunately social services is under-funded and can only do so much. If a child needs to be removed from their home, they will be, but it is a last resort. These cases are terrible, but it is not the fault of a social worker, families are very good at hiding what they do not want seen.


All of the good work that social workers do on a daily basis are ignored, whereas cases like these are all over the news, giving them a bad name.


Social workers are not perfect, like others they make mistakes, but they do as much as they can with the resources they have available.
Reply:Social workers are always held accountable for their actions, in fact they are often scapegoated and hung out to dry when failings and mistakes are not EVER down to the actions (or inactions) of 1 person.


Anybody who see's a child death in the media in which social services were involved is naive if they think only social workers were a) aware of and b) the only professionals trying to address the issues.


If a child dies a full investigation is conducted and IF the social worker is found to be negligent in ANY way they are de-registered - just like a doctor would be. check out the GSCC website for details on this





I am not sure what people mean when they say social workers don't act to prevent abuse for fear of upsetting the families. Where has this come from? I have not yet read the facts of these cases but all too often parents who are abusing their children are very good at avoiding contacxt with social workers and removing a child without evidence is impossble.