Pelka: social workers let down the children who really need them Social services are at fault for failing to intervene when it is justified, but also for being too ready to do so when no action is called for By Christopher Booker 5:53PM BST 03 Aug 2013 It hardly needed Coventry’s senior MP to call for the resignation of the head of the city’s children’s services to tell us that the awful death of little Daniel Pelka (pictured right) represents one of the most glaring examples of a failure by our “child protection” system since the case of Peter Connolly hit the headlines in 2008. The “Baby P” scandal is widely cited by the authorities as the reason why, since April 2008, the number of applications to remove children from their families in England and Wales has more than doubled, from 380 to nearly 1,000 a month. The impression given is that our social workers have now become doubly vigilant to ensure that such a horrifying series of blunders is never repeated. This, however, is belied by the statistics that show that in the past three years, the number of children removed from their families for “physical abuse” has actually fallen, from 5,000 to 4,600. By far the biggest percentage increase, 56 per cent, has been in children removed for “emotional abuse”. This includes that wonderfully vague excuse, increasingly fashionable with social workers, of “the risk of emotional abuse”, meaning that they don’t even have to show that children have been actually abused, merely that there may be a possibility of this happening sometime in the future. The real scandal, of course, is not just that social workers too often fail to act where a child is being genuinely ill-treated, but that they are far too quick to seize children from responsible parents for wholly inadequate reasons. The teachers at Daniel’s school recorded abundant signs of how he was being neglected and physically harmed, without any action being taken. But too often the situation is the very reverse, where teachers misinterpret some remark made by a pupil and are then much too quick to call in social services, with devastating results. Hence several such cases I have reported here, such as the loving mother who lost both her children simply because a teacher overheard her daughter saying, “My mother hit me”, when this was no more than a slap on the arm with a roll of cling film, because the girl was not getting on with her homework. Social workers love to defend themselves by saying, “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t”. What they cannot understand is that in reality, both these things can be true. They are at fault both in failing to intervene when it is justified, but equally in being much too trigger-happy to intervene when no action is called for. The tragedy of all this can be summed up in a phrase I coined years ago to describe what is going on with our regulatory system in many different areas – that it is “taking a sledgehammer to miss the nut”. Nowhere is this more obvious than in a system that tears thousands of families apart for no good reason, while somehow managing at the same time to turn a blind eye to all the evidence that children such as Daniel Pelka are being slowly tortured to death. telegraph.co.uk/comment/10220085/Pelka-social-workers-let-down-the-children-who-really-need-them.html
Posted on: Wed, 07 Aug 2013 18:09:28 +0000
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