help

collapse

Press one of the expand buttons to see the full text of an article. Later press collapse to revert to the original form. The buttons below expand or collapse all articles.

expand

collapse

Alternate Universe

November 17, 2012 permalink

Modern physics postulates a bizarre world in which the properties of a particle are determined not when it is created but only when it is destroyed, where between creation and destruction particles exist only as a probability wave and where every observation alters the event being observed. Added to this mix some authors have proposed another strange phenomenon: an alternate universe, only a tiny fraction of an inch away but outside the normal three spatial dimensions. In this alternate universe events have taken a different course, and the laws of nature may differ from the conventional world.

A speech by British secretary of state for education Michael Gove gives proof of the existence of an alternate universe. It is a universe populated only by social workers and others earning a living breaking up families for claims on appropriated funds. In the real world, social workers grab children from families at rates way higher than parental abuse. In the alternate universe, social workers put the rights of biological parents ahead of vulnerable children. In the real world once a child is in foster care social workers fight tooth and nail to keep him there. In the alternate universe when children are removed from homes where they're at risk they're often returned prematurely and exposed to danger all over again. In the real world social workers act like bullies, forcing parents to give up their children or separate from their spouse. In the alternate universe social workers should be more assertive with dysfunctional parents. Even in the alternate universe, state-run institutions for the care of children are highly abusive. Gove mentions Ofsted inspections that find fault with Doncaster. In the real world, such faults are cause for caution. Children's circumstances can only be improved when taken from homes even worse than the state-funded variety. But in the alternate universe, social workers must take children based solely on the squalor they encounter. Anybody know what physics it takes to knock this crowd the inch back to reality?

expand

collapse

Michael Gove launches damning attack on child protection system

Social workers have become 'desensitised to squalor' and need to be more assertive with dysfunctional parents, according to Michael Gove's damning critique of the child protection system

Michael Gove
Gove will be 'uncompromising' about child protection reform
Pic: Rex Features

Education secretary Michael Gove has launched a damning attack on the child protection system, admitting the state is failing in its duty to keep children safe.

In a speech at the Institute of Public Policy Research today, where he launched Lord Carlile's review of the Edlington torture case, Gove delivered his critique of child protection services in England.

He said too many local authorities are failing to meet acceptable standards for child safeguarding and promised to be “explicitly challenging, deliberately uncompromising and blunt” in his response to the “deeply depressing” situation.

“We put the rights of biological parents ahead of vulnerable children - even when those parents are incapable of leading their own lives safely,” Gove said. “When we do intervene it is often too late. When children are removed from homes where they're at risk they're often returned prematurely and exposed to danger all over again.”

'Intrusive and inefficient bureaucracy'

He continued: “Instead of concentrating properly on the appalling neglect and abuse visited on children by those they know or who are in the family's immediate circle, we have been pre-occupied by the much smaller risk of strangers causing harm and in so doing have established an intrusive and inefficient bureaucracy, which creates a false feeling of security for parents while alienating volunteers and eroding personal responsibility."

Gove acknowledged that his government must accept some responsibility. “We do not support the social work profession properly, nor have we modernised its ways of working in line with other professions,” Gove said.

Local authority social workers should be more assertive with dysfunctional parents, Gove said, while family courts should be “less indulgent of poor parents”.

Social workers are too often blighted by an “optimism bias”, Gove claimed, adding that, “for perfectly understandable reasons”, professionals can be reluctant to challenge the behaviour of adults whose trust they are trying to win.

'Social workers desensitised to squalor'

“Social workers – partly because so much of their time is spent in difficult circumstances many of us will never encounter – can become desensitised to the squalor they encounter and less shockable overall. Which is why it’s up to the rest of us to show leadership,” Gove said.

Bridget Robb, acting chief of the British Association of Social Workers, said social workers will welcome aspects of Gove's analysis, like the lack of support afforded to social workers, and "the reality that it is not the care system that creates dysfunctional adults, but the lives young people live before being removed from their homes".

Robb said: "What his analysis overlooks, however, is that protecting children also involves learning from evidence from around the world telling us that simply cutting them off from their birth families is not always in their best interests.

"The minister's speech also offers no recognition of how part of the state's ‘failure in its duty to keep our children safe’ lies in a refusal to understand that it requires sustained investment in better services if we are to better protect children, whether this is done through intensive work with parents or by taking more children into care. The latter is not cheap, and to pretend social workers can take on greater caseloads with diminishing resources is a miscalculation Mr Gove surely must recognise."

Lord Carlile's review

Gove discussed recent Ofsted inspections that found safeguarding arrangements inadequate or in need of improvement – including those in Doncaster – and Lord Carlile’s “compelling” set of recommendations, which he said need “careful consideration” and “time for debate”.

Lord Carlile was asked to review the situation in Doncaster, following a number of child protection failings and, in 2009, a violent assault in Edlington by two boys who were looked-after by the council and subject to a child protection plan.

Among his recommendations, Lord Carlile said all children’s services should develop triage arrangements to assess risks to children.

“This will include fast and profoundly co-operative interdisciplinary co-working, excellent written and electronic document trails, and a demonstrable ability to respond to urgent situations efficiently,” Lord Carlile said. More to follow.

Source: Community Care

A British comment on Michael Gove.

expand

collapse

Why mum is better than Big Mother

It is better for children to be with their parents, even those deemed ‘bad’ by the state, than to languish in care.

‘The facts are deeply depressing’, said UK education secretary Michael Gove at the end of last week. ‘Too many local authorities are failing to meet acceptable standards for child safeguarding. Too many children are left for far too long in homes where they are exposed to appalling neglect and criminal mistreatment. We put the rights of biological parents ahead of vulnerable children – even when those parents are incapable of leading their own lives safely and with dignity never mind bringing up children. When we do intervene, it is often too late.’

In terms of the contemporary political climate, Gove was not saying anything particularly unusual. For several years now, the ability of mum and dad to bring up their kids without outside, state-backed intervention has regularly been called into question. Indeed, such is the low esteem in which our rulers now hold parents that earlier this year, prime minister David Cameron felt sufficiently emboldened to propose nationwide parenting classes.

Still, it is a dubious testament to Gove’s eloquence that he gave a striking expression to the state’s usurpation of the role traditionally played by adult family members. As he put it, ‘the rights of biological parents’ have for too long been treated as precious. It is time, Gove is saying, for these filial bonds, which have been central to society for centuries, to be demystified, disenchanted. After all, what is a mother or a father, or a daughter or a son, other than an arbitrary accident of nature? The words signify nothing more valuable than a set of random ‘biological’ outcomes. To privilege certain adult-child relationships on the basis of biology is to succumb to the allure of tradition, and to condemn many children to a lifetime of misery. ‘In all too many cases when we decide to leave children in need with their biological parents’, Gove concluded, ‘we are leaving them to endure a life of soiled nappies and scummy baths, chaos and hunger, hopelessness and despair’.

With the family blithely dismantled, and the roles of father and mother treated as little more than semiotic jetsam, Gove was able to propose his alternative to biology: the artifice of the state. ‘I firmly believe more children should be taken into care more quickly and that too many children are allowed to stay too long with parents whose behaviour is unacceptable. I want social workers to be more assertive with dysfunctional parents, courts to be less indulgent of poor parents, and the care system to expand to deal with the consequences.’

Gove’s is a frightening vision. As the meaning and value of being mum or dad is actively reduced by politicians to mere biological facts – in short, as tradition is wilfully disenchanted – so it becomes easier for the state, through its various agents, to assume the role of guardian. The result, complete with empowered or ‘more assertive’ social workers, and their correlative, impotent and less assertive parents, is a society with ever increasing numbers of children placed into Britain’s far from distinguished care system.

Quite why this scenario is considered progressive is not entirely clear. Living with a mum or a dad deemed ‘bad’ or ‘poor’ by a social worker would surely, in many cases, be far better for a child than surviving, parentless, even in a vastly improved care system. Besides, while Gove might not care to acknowledge it, the bond between parents and their children is not merely biological; it is possessed of considerable human and social value, too. Parents do not simply love their children; they help to socialise them, and act as a source of authority. To seek to erode this bond even further than it has been is deeply reckless.

But perhaps this should not be a surprise. After all, the momentum behind this drive is born not of respect for adult citizens, but of a profound suspicion of our ability to look after ourselves. In this regard, the occasion for Gove’s remarks was telling: the publication of Lord Carlile of Berriew’s report into the 2009 attack on an 11-year-old boy and a nine-year-old boy in Edlington by two brothers then aged 11 and 10.

The brutality of this attack was nearly as shocking as the age of the protagonists. The two victims were stabbed, stoned, burnt and forced to mimic a sexual act before the brothers eventually got bored and left the two boys for dead. In the words of the sentencing judge, Justice Keith, the case was ‘truly exceptional’, which was precisely why, like the case of 10-year-old Mary Bell strangling two infants to death in 1968, or the killing of two-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-olds in 1993, it received so much coverage.

But the Tory government-to-be refused to treat the 2009 attack as exceptional. It sought to present it as an insight into the state of society, a window on to the neglect-ridden and casually abusive landscape that dominates towns and cities up and down the country. As the future prime minister David Cameron said at the time: ‘On each occasion, are we just going to say this is an individual case? That there aren’t any links to what is going wrong in our wider society…’ Such was the Tories’ determination to see something general in the exceptional horrors of the Edlington case that Gove was driven to criticise the original special case review published earlier this year: ‘It documents everything that happened but with insufficient analysis of why and what could have been done differently.’ That is, the SCR refused to draw lessons for the whole of society from the Edlington case. Hence Gove was prompted to commission Lord Carlile to provide the report the government really wanted, one in which an endemic lack of state intervention was presented as the problem.

The result, as we have seen, is the casual, callous dismissal of parents’ ‘biological’ rights and the call for a more assertive cadre of social workers. The grisly irony of such a move is that the exceptional cases of neglect, such as that involving the Edlington brothers, will actually become harder to spot when ever more families are rendered suspect. Turning the state into Big Mother will do neither parents nor children any favours.

Tim Black is senior writer at spiked.

Source: Spiked

sequential