Daniel Pelka And Social Work

A child is dead. Again. And as if to ram home that the authorities involved really don't care all their attention and that of the excuse-machine investigation is centred on avoiding responsibility.

We have wittering half-wits on the TV saying, in that special calm, half whisper beloved of the 'caring', that the agencies involved should be bolder in 'challenging' what they are told by parents under suspicion. That the agencies should have a mechanism for talking to each other about concerns.

All this is meant to sound reasonable, all of it addressing 'issues', but what really underlies this kind of empty cant is 'will you please go away'. But it isn't reasonable, is it? If a teacher saw a child in such distress as Daniel was clearly showing (or 'presenting' in social work case-conference speak), then he/she could approach the parents for an explanation.

But no. In today's caring, multi-agency child-protection world the teacher must cross check to see if anyone else has spotted anything. Like a policeman coming across a fight and rather than breaking it up, calls some other 'agency' to see what they think. A doctor with a patient presenting with a knife in his head, wonders if anyone else thinks this might be important.

What these people who do say anything about their failures say, and as many as possible don't pass comment, is that this should have happened and that should have happened and he slipped through the net, but mostly the nasty, lying, manipulating parent was to blame because they lied to the social workers and doctors and police.

I can't believe that people nowadays are genetically less caring as individuals, as human beings, so it must be cultural. And that culture will be provided by ideology and management. The ideology provides all the style of speech and emphasis on the importance of self and the management live in that bubble, carefully avoiding actually doing anything. It is of course, the socialist way. Marxism is the over riding concern of social workers and all their efforts must be made in the light of the ideology.

Pretty soon it becomes apparent this is poor practice, so the multi-agency network is set up to spread responsibility and more importantly, blame. No one is ever to blame it is the system. And the people at the top have the strongest motivation to make sure that system does not change.

This was put into stark daylight by the shrieking of Sharon Shoesmith who was aghast to find herself being held personally accountable. No one, herself included could possibly be responsible as all the boxes had been ticked, she said. It appeared to have slipped her attention that a child was dead. Or that the 'paperwork' referred to a real person.

In her world, passing paper around, signing this off and getting that box ticked, is their life. It is what they draw their salary for. Shoesmith's responsibility as far as she was concerned was to make sure everyone was filling in the boxes. No wonder the intrusion of teh subject of the forms and tick-boxes came as such a shock to her.

Do we need change? Yes we do. Marxism as a malign influence is infecting everything from hospitals that now kill on an epic scale, to hapless police officers stumbling from excuse for this accidental shooting to explaining expenses, to careless social workers and HR departments wrecking companies by their tick box mentality.

Some years ago a judge said that he would never find against a social worker as the presumption has to be that their intentions were good. When was that last true?

Not Just The NHS

It was interesting to see in addition to the praise heaped on the NHS, that manages to limit the unnecessary deaths it causes to 'only' 1,000 a month, at the opening ceremony for the Olympics there was also a mention for Social Workers. It was perhaps a little obscure, if accurately rendered. The television commentary referred to a man in black driving a prison van with horses, as a character from children's fiction, but of course today the most prolific child snatcher is the State.

Social Workers, with the connivance of the police and hiding behind the cloak of secrecy provided by the way family courts work, have become very active in taking children away from their parents. This usually involves children who are at no risk, because the parents of such children are not rude and threatening towards social workers, unlike those who actually abuse their offspring.

So much better and easier, to deal only with pleasant, conforming people who were brought up to respect 'authority' (it used to deserve it) and the rule of law. Naturally quota's come into it and breaking the law themselves rarely seems a problem for social workers, either morally or in the eyes of the courts. Much of the media don't care about this, so it isn't widely reported. Find out for yourself and you will be horrified.

And I mean horrified by the little you are allowed to know, not the full extent of what they are up to.