Making a meal of it

Myself and another legal rep were a little taken aback to be told recently that we were ‘making a meal of it’, ‘it’ being the alleged assaults by a father upon his children by blows to the head. Not – apparently - a child protection concern because the kids, now just in double digits, don’t present as frightened. Well [...]

Computer says ‘NO’

I’ve often read s47 reports, core assessments and reg 38 assessments which find themselves in amongst my case papers and wondered what purpose they serve other than to obfuscate questions of risk.  Chatting the other week with a social worker confirms anecdotally at least that some social workers agree. These documents are ridiculously long and [...]

Standard Stuff

On the way back through Paddington at the end of a day in the High Court yesterday  I was not astonished to see a rather distasteful piece fronting up the Evening Standard. From reading the information emblazoned across the front page one might reasonably have formed the view that Ms Shoesmith, formerly of Haringey had personally and forcibly snatched a [...]

Baby P

So many words bandied about by so many people. Big, descriptive, superlative words. Unimaginable. Horrific. And so it is. But ‘unspeakable’ (Times Leader earlier this week)? Plainly it isn’t, as everyone is doing just that. .  A lot of talk about ‘risk’. What is sometimes forgotten is that there are two sorts of risk. The [...]

better off without ‘em?

Before I make this post let me say that what I report here is in my experience unrepresentative of social work standards in general. Most social workers maintain professionalism, objectivity and open-mindedness. . I was mortified to hear a social worker involved in a case I was dealing with recently joke about how the children [...]

social worker blogs

this new blog from a trainee social worker in the US looks like it could develop into something interesting. and an already established social work blog (also from the US) is already rather engaging.