A new task force in Northern Ireland has been set up by the The Department of Health to protect social workers inside the country from violence and abuse. The committee will look at ways in which employers can improve the safety of social workers.

The task force was created after a survey revealed that almost nine out of ten social workers said they had been intimidated by service users. The survey, which received 259 responses, was included in a report published by The British Association of Social Workers (NI) in June 2018, called “Insult and Injury: Exploring the impacts of intimidation, threats and violence against social workers”. Over half of social workers (51%) who took the survey held positions in Children and Family Services.

The creation of the task force was revealed at the end of last month, by Chief Social Work Officer for Northern Ireland, Sean Holland, during a conference held by the British Association of Social Workers UK. We reached out to Sean for comment, but have not yet received a response.

Despite being instrumental in organising this task force, the Chief Social Work Officer has chosen not to make a loud noise about the development on his Twitter account, choosing only to retweet a radio interview which was aired at the start of the week on U 105.8FM with the National Director of the BASW NI, Carolyn Ewart, who discusses the task force. The decision not to push the campaign on his Twitter account could stem from a concern that service users, who feel they are routinely targeted and abused by social workers, may react angrily to the news.

The report suggests that three-quarters of social workers in Northern Ireland have received threats and half have been subjected to physical violence. Social workers also claim that service users are abusing the complaints process as a way of intimidating them, which they say is undermining their confidence to carry out their jobs successfully. Other intimidation tactics described by social workers included:

• Behaviour intended to make them worried or afraid, despite no explicit threat being made against them;
• Subtle attempts to discredit social workers, verbal abuse on occasion with racist undertones, swearing, name calling, and threats to cause harm;
• Using social media to post false and malicious information about social workers and;
• The recording of visits to service users’ homes, which respondents claim caused significant stress and anxiety.

The report features several quotes by social workers describing their day to day experiences while carrying out their jobs. A Residential Childcare Social Worker told the authors of the report that, “It wasn’t so much being threatened by the young person, it was.. the relentless abuse of myself and my colleagues, on a daily basis, that was difficult to deal with”.

The findings also include information about the types and frequency of threats, with 75% of social workers surveyed saying that they had received threats of violence against them, their family members, colleagues and the organisations that they worked for. A Children’s Services Social Worker offers her experience of this in the report. She says, “On one occasion when trying to remove a child from a house with police, a service user threatened to get his gun and shoot my colleague and me. Fortunately the police removed the weapon”.

The report makes 13 recommendations which include self defence training, the provision of safety alarms or security apps for social workers, reporting procedures, the production of a guide by BASW NI, and an audit of security features within all social work workplaces. There is also a recommendation to allow social workers to be transferred away from cases if they would like to be moved after experiencing abuse.

The report’s findings will upset families going through the child protection system, who feel that social workers have long targeted them for their personal circumstances, treating them poorly and placing personal and professional interests above the interests of the families and children they come into contact with. Complaints processes are often the only way that families can highlight poor or unethical treatment inside the system, though they are often ignored and more likely to be subjected to abuse and vendetta driven decision making after complaining. The use of police to remove children from family homes is also a deeply traumatic experience for children, and parents can react aggressively to these practices.

The use of recording equipment to make a record of meetings has become increasingly widespread, after families began to notice that their explanations and descriptions of events and family histories were being inaccurately quoted by social workers in child welfare reports. It is not a coincidence that recordings have increased as more confirmed cases of social workers fabricating evidence come to light. There is also currently no right for families who feel targeted by their social worker to be transferred to another child welfare professional.

Families going through child protection proceedings have reacted strongly on social media to the creation of the task force. One service user posted:

“What about the threats [social workers] make and the documents parents are forced to sign under duress or without being fully informed of the consequences?”

A mother with several years’ experience of the child protection sector said, “I think if there was some accountability there would be less anger,” while a family law researcher and expert witness took the view that the abuse was a foreseeable result of poor practice. 

While violence is never acceptable, and our site does not condone it in any context except for legitimate self defence, research looking into social workers’ experiences of their interactions with service users has to be placed within context, and cannot be fully understood in a standalone survey.

Many thanks to Dana for alerting us to this development.

A new case involving Hertfordshire council confirms that social workers at the local authority manipulated evidence in order to place children into care without any proof of harm. With an ever growing number of family cases involving councils producing incorrect or fabricated evidence, questions around commercial interests inside the sector must now be asked.

The judge overseeing the case thought that the lead social worker allocated to the family had good intentions, and that evidence based anomalies were just down to poor practice, however facts emerging after the judgment was made public, offer a different view.

The case centers around allegations involving a family with four children. The council tried to place the children in foster care or within adoptive placements after injuries were catalogued, and a threat by the mother to stab one of the children with a knife was revealed. The council also noted that the family home was untidy, and that the mother had a history of losing her temper, and refused to discuss issues around sexual abuse with her children.

The mother admitted making the threat, and her partner admitted tapping the children on the head, but both disputed other claims made by the council. The mother also felt it would be inappropriate and unnecessary to talk about child sexual abuse with her children.

The judgment offers some deeply troubling insights into the council’s handling of the case. It reveals a strategy used by social workers to piece together the evidence with a view to creating a narrative which painted the family in the worst possible light. One way in which the social workers did this, was by lumping the children’s injuries together without acknowledging the origins of those injuries. Judge Wilding found, for example, that most of the injuries noted by the social workers had happened at school, and that all of the injuries observed were accidental. Of significant importance is what happens next.

The council then lies about findings made within a medical report.

While a child protection medical undertaken never once references any injury as being non-accidental, the council claimed otherwise. Here’s the section from the judgment:

“In 2010 a number of referrals to children services were made regarding emotional sexual and physical abuse”. In addition, the ADM [Agency Decision Maker] recorded that “following D’s six-week check where he was found to have a considerable graze on his foot “;”M was unable to give an explanation and the medical confirmed it was a non-accidental injury “. It is plain when one reads the child protection medical that Dr Moore, whilst concerned mother was not aware that D had sustained an injury which was regarded as a “significant abrasion”, it was still nevertheless described as a “relatively minor injury “. At no time was it said that it was a non-accidental injury.”

The council then tries to use this lie to push its application for removing the children from their parents.

Another important piece of information revealed not in the judgment, but by the BBC when it covered the story on 27th October, tells us that it was social services bosses who had wanted to place the children for adoption or with foster carers. Judge Wilding makes an important observation in his judgment which links in with the BBC’s claim. After noting that the local authority eventually accepted that none of the injuries on the children had been deliberately inflicted, and that there was no risk of sexual abuse, he says this:

“There was, in my judgement, throughout the local authority’s evidence a pervasive failure to accurately state the correct position by reference to the primary evidence, there was also, in my judgement, a tendency to only look at the negatives in respect of this family and not the positives and to wrongly infer from the evidence that something was a “concern “or to put it another way a risk when it was not. In addition, there was a tendency for inaccuracy in stating what other professionals had said.”

Let’s go back to the social services bosses at Hertfordshire council for a moment. Why would council bosses have a vested interest in placing four children up for adoption or foster placements? The answer isn’t that hard to find. Adoption in the UK is financially incentivised, which means that as long as councils are hitting targets and placing children with adoptive families, the money keeps coming in. The fostering sector also offers the promise of lucrative payouts, so as councils feel the impact of austerity and pre Brexit fallout, they are pressing on services which continue to generate revenue. In 2018, removing children from their parents is big business. 

Judge Wilding returned the children in the case to their parents, but not before they had to experience the strange and ugly world of child protection. That ordeal may well leave scars they will have to carry for the rest of their lives.

It would be right to mention that errors do feature in many of the injustices that play out inside the child protection sector, but there is a competing malice which sometimes goes hand in hand with its lesser companion, poor practice. Judge Wilding may not have had the courage to call out the dishonesty in this case for the breach in law that it represents, but the increasing number of judgments highlighting negligence and wilful wrongdoing in family cases has caught the attention of the public, and they’re not letting go.

Removing children from their parents to put them up for adoption can be done forcibly in the UK. This means that the government can take children away from their parents without their consent, making it much easier to remove children without proper consideration. We already know that non consensual adoption, or forced adoption as it is sometimes called, is bad for birth families and children. Most countries around the world today use consensual adoption practices, which are much more humane. If you believe the UK should end its forced adoption policy, please consider signing our petition. 

Bradford council’s child protection services have been deemed inadequate overall by Ofsted, whose catalogue of failures included failing to get parental consent and subjecting children to unnecessary investigations. The government’s child services regulator said the council’s poor practices were placing children at risk of significant harm.

The rating comes after a string of serious failures by the council, which saw its social workers routinely neglect to get parental consent when it was required, leading to a significant number of children being subjected to unnecessary and excessive interventions in cases where there were no overriding child protection concerns.

The report confirms that children were being inappropriately interviewed by partner agencies, sometimes without getting parental consent first. The report also found that Bradford council failed to identify children genuinely in need of help.

As well as poor practice, Ofsted’s report outlines problems with high social worker turnover, a lack of foster carers and failures to fully train social work staff. Poor evidence gathering, and the varying quality of evidence for cases going to court were also listed as issues.

There is significant information detailed in the report on the cash injection Bradford council received to address perceived increases in demand for its services and a drop in social worker numbers at the local authority. The report notes that the council used that cash boost to prioritise the employment of more staff, as well as “strengthening the structure of the service”. It’s not clear from the report exactly what strengthening the council’s child protection service structure involved, though it may refer to the council’s development of decision making panels and quality assurance checks.

The report identifies some positive work within the council, too. The inspector for Ofsted, Neil Penswick, found that Bradford Council’s response to children at risk of child sexual exploitation was strong, and the team working with these children was thorough and organised.

A former social worker sitting on the judging panel of the social care sector’s biggest awards ceremony, has pulled out after discovering that management company Capita, was sponsoring the event. Capita has been embroiled in several high profile scandals, which include the company’s involvement in creating financial incentives at the Home Office to remove people from the UK (Windrush).

Nick Berbiers announced on Twitter last week that he would not be attending The Social Worker of the Year Awards. It’s not the first time that Nick has raised concerns about sponsors at the annual event. In his statement, Nick describes previous attempts at trying to alert the organisers to unsuitable sponsors. The statement gives the impression that the Board did not take Nick’s concerns seriously, leading the social worker to periodically step down from the judging panel between 2010 and 2016. Nick says in his tweet that he missed the sponsor’s name when he initially got involved in this year’s event, however upon noticing Capita’s presence, decided to step down from the panel.

Social Workers Without Borders, a charity nominated for an award at the ceremony, has also said it won’t attend, after discovering that Capita was sponsoring this year’s event.

The embarrassing fiasco has led to the ceremony’s board of trustees promising to hold an “ethics audit” of the annual event’s sponsors.

Capita has a long record of marks against its name, which spans not only the Windrush scandal, but features a scathing review from the Commons Select Committee over its callous handling of medical assessments for disability benefits, which it managed on behalf of the government. The Committee concluded that 60% of Capita’s reports were unacceptable. A subsidiary company belonging to Capita which employed immigration removal escort staff, was also deemed this year to have used excessive restraint on detainees who were flown out of the UK, by HM Inspectorate of Prisons.

This development comes during a particularly difficult time for the social care sector. Hit by increasingly sharp budget cuts and in freefall as it struggles to cope with an out of date child protection system and rising referrals for support, the sector is constantly looking to find ways to balance its budgets. This has resulted in unlikely, and often unethical partnerships between organisations. An example where these kinds of pairings raise the greatest concerns involve children’s charities like Barnardo’s teaming up with adoption agencies to help bolster their support services.

Agreements which would ordinarily be viewed as deeply unethical, are now the norm inside the sector.

The government will be holding a debate today, looking at ways to fund the social care sector. Members of the public are able to attend the event free of charge, which starts at 3.35pm, and will be held in Committee Room 1, at the Palace of Westminster.