Madmutt’s Blog

The Daily Mail has launched another tirade against social workers over the last few days. This is following the adoption of two children by a gay couple against the wishes of their grandparents. Littlejohn today has called the social workers involved in the case “Monsters”. The Mail only reports the grandparents version of events and uses this to again bash social workers. There are several problems with the Mail’s approach.

It fails to mention the fact that this decision would have been made by a court on the recommendation of social services. The court made the decision regarding adoption not the social workers. A fact that the Mail fails to report because it does not make such a good story.

They also report this story safe in the knowledge that the social workers and the local authority involved in the case cannot answer back due to confidentiality.

It is interesting that social workers are in this case being criticised for removing children from their drug using mother, whilst in the Baby P case, they were criticised by the same paper and The Sun for failing to remove the child from his abusive mother. It is truely a case of being damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

The effect of the tirade by this paper and others, is to demoralise the profession that has the unenviable task of clearing up society’s mess. As a result, bright people will choose other professions or existing social workers will leave, putting already stretched child protection teams under more pressure, leaving less time per case and as a result more children will be put at risk. I would love to see reporters from the Mail and The Sun spend some time with social workers as they do their jobs and see if they could make the difficult decisions that we have to make on a day to day basis in order to protect the vulnerable in society.

Simon