The Blame Game

Earlier today I read an article in The Guardian from Dr Sharon Shoesmith recounting how she was scapegoated and lost her job following the death of Baby P.

She talked about something I believe social workers face far too much of - blame.

And often without sufficient justification.

Her account of what she endured in no way surprises me.

But what did surprise me, was the information that in the UK on average, there are 58 child deaths by assault or undetermined intent a year, and that child homicides are most commonly caused by a child's parent or step-parent.

What does that tell you about the society in which we are living?

In her article, a Professor Andrew Cooper explains why he thinks society behaves in the way it so often does. Basically he argues that the pain of knowing that children are being harmed is too great to bear and so the perceived incompetence of social workers provides a defence for society against having to tolerate such horrifying knowledge.

I think Professor Cooper's view is correct because we live in a society that would rather seek to criticise, scapegoat and blame social worker's for the death of children; rather than seek to understand the complexities inherent in the social work role, and face the dreadful responsibility of accepting that there are numerous people in society who have, and will continue to kill and injure the most vulnerable people in their family.

Having been a social worker for all of my adult life, I am of the opinion that social workers have always been fraught with or closely associated with blame.

Social workers have long been a very easy target of blame in this society because the public and the media have no clear knowledge of what we actually do.

If you compare social workers to nurses or teachers for example, there is no comparison.

The public and the media know that teachers and nurses provide basically a worthwhile or valued role.

Teachers teach and nurses save lives.

What social workers do in the eyes of the public, is either fail to intervene and save a child's life, or intervene when it's not necessary.

They serve no obvious role in, I suspect, most people's minds.

When you add to the narrative that no one wants to have a social worker visiting them because for parents that is tantamount to accusing them of being a bad parent - and no one ever wants to view themselves in that way - it becomes clearer why social workers are prone to be disliked and thus easy to be scapegoated and blamed.

To compound the difficulty for social workers, the profession is weak - in that it fails to provide a robust defence, or argument in support of its role and usefulness.

Powerful institutions, like the police, the media and others, particularly in a culture of blame, will always seek to shift culpability away from themselves and onto easy targets.

And they will continue to be successful in doing so, until social workers as individuals and collectively as a profession, begin to value themselves far more highly and stand up for themselves.