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PANIC IS
NOT A SOLUTION
The
Sunday Times (London) September 29 1985
By
Brian Deer, Social Affairs Correspondent
"WHY?" was the question everyone was
asking last week about the murder of Heidi Koseda,
the little girl who was starved to death by her
stepfather. It was the same thing we wanted to know
after the killings of Jasmine Beckford and Tyra
Henry. Why did the public agencies specifically
responsible for their protection let them down?
It is
easy to attach blame to individuals. In Heidi's case,
the NSPCC's inspector fabricated reports. Jasmine
Beckford's social worker rarely saw the child. The
social workers in Tyra Henry's case left the little
girl in the clearest danger of attack.
These
instances have alarmed the public and taken a heavy
toll on the reputation of social workers. An opinion
survey by Gallup after the Beckford and Henry trials
- but before the Koseda case came to court - showed
that 45% of those asked had read or heard something
to make them view social workers less favourably.
Observers
with long memories last week pointed out that social
work got a similar battering 12 years ago after the
public inquiry into the death of Maria Colwell, aged
7, who was killed by her stepfather while under the
supervision of Sussex social services. In that case,
as in last week's, neighbours pleaded for the NSPCC
to intervene.
After
the Colwell case the morale of public agencies was
shattered and, in response to the widespread
accusation that they should never have left Maria
with her family, social workers became more cautious,
and more inclined to take children into care.
Place-of-safety
orders, granted by magistrates to allow the emergency
removal of a child from its parents, jumped from 214
in the year ending March 1973 to 353 the following
year, after the Colwell inquiry sitting - and to 596
in the year ending March 1975, after the report was
published. The annual rise before the case was only
10.
There
is no doubt that the publicity over Maria's death led
to this switch in attitudes. Martin Davies, professor
of social work at East Anglia University, says:
"Every media exposure means there is a
consequential tightening of procedures and also
social workers making more effort to cover themselves
against criticism."
But
even by the mid-1970s, doubts were beginning to
emerge about the new tougher policy. Social work is
about balancing risks, it was argued, and indignant
social workers insisted that assessing those risks
should not be the province of journalists, or at the
whim of sensational headlines.
They
argued that in trying to judge the risk to a child
from violent parents, the side of the calculation
often forgotten by outsiders was the different sort
of damage that can be done to a child by taking it
into care. Residential homes are obviously a poor
alternative to family life, and perhaps a third of
all fosterings break down. As Christine Hammond of
the British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering says:
"You can make care through adoption and
fostering as good as you can, but it is not a real
substitute." And so by the end of the decade,
the accepted view was that the job of social services
was to support children in their homes and to help
the family together.
The
shape of that support had by then fully evolved:
counselling parents about health and housing,
teaching them how to discipline and suggesting how to
show affection, providing advice and companionship in
drop-in centres, finding nursery places for children
under five.
Such
preventive work, however, means greater risks and
also requires able and well-trained social workers,
who need to adopt a supportive attitude, but at the
same time keep the alertness necessary to spot the
potential child-killer among the much larger number
of parents who abuse in isolated outbursts of anger
or frustration.
This
is where the system has broken down. In recent years,
training has been poor and tight financial controls
on local government have not helped to improve it.
Social workers have become "generalists",
dealing with every problem from old people, to the
handicapped and delinquent youths. The special
problem of child abuse and the specialist skill
required to deal with it, have been submerged in the
deluge of other work.
Now,
with the panic beginning to set in again, the balance
will inevitably swing back towards the easy solution
of taking more children into care. "If we are
being blamed for the fact that the risks don't always
work out right, then we will play safe," says
one social work team leader. "We are bound to
think that 'this could happen to me' when we see what
happens to the social worker involved."
But
social workers didn't kill Jasmine, Tyra or Heidi, a
fact which their spokesmen laboured last week to
little effect. It is true that their failings allowed
these killings to take place. But forgetting to see a
child, leaving a baby in a dangerous home or pushing
a file to the bottom of the stack, are all-too-human
failings. It does not make it any easier or any
better for social services to swing the policy from
the extreme of taking very few children into care to
the opposite extreme of taking almost every
endangered child into care.
Somehow
we have to arrive at the correct balance between
social care and family life. The central issue, the
risk to children, is not going to change. Valerie
Howarth, social serves head for Brent, where Jasmine
Beckford died, says: "What people don't
understand is that we deal with those risks on behalf
of the community, and whatever we do, those risks
won't go away."
Copyright,
Times Newspapers Ltd. All rights reserved. No portion
of this article on the physical abuse and murder of
children may be copied, retransmitted, reposted,
duplicated or otherwise used without the express
written approval of the copyright owner. Responses,
information and other feedback are appreciated - via
Brian Deer's homepage.
