The Political Thread

[TordelBack]

The DSS has "the right" to take children from their parents and does so with alarming regularity. This is as blatant an example of ownership, and thus slavery, as I can think of.

Quite the opposite.  It is an example of society declaring that parents don't own their children, that children have a right to health and happiness independent of family circumstances, and society has an obligation to ensure this.  I certainly won't deny that state social services get this impossible job wrong too often, especially not living in the RoI, but the principle and much of the practice is a rejection of ownership in favour of the defenceless individual.   

Parents are people, not omniscient superbeings, and sometimes they fuck up and are fucked up.  That society can see individuals as well as families is a good thing.

[The Legendary Shark]

It is a slippery slope. There may very well be a common law justification to take an infant away from its parents in extreme cases and as a last resort but more and more families are being split up because its easier and makes more money for the state.
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If a family struggling to make ends meet (to pay for their own slavery) implodes and takes it out on a child, that is a deplorable crime worthy of punishment. So money is pumped into investigations and court cases and expert witnesses and care centres and foster homes and all that. Just a fraction of that expense, a fraction of all that resource, if put into easing the struggling family's burden, carrying some of the weight, I think far more could be achieved. Moreso if the professional social workers on the ground have more say than political and corporate policy makers.
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In England, secret family courts are held quite regularly and many children are taken from their families never to be seen again. Some are sure to end up in very dark places indeed if recent news coverage is to be believed.
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Like many government projects, the DSS has been perverted into a cash machine - once again taking something good and poisoning it from the head down. There's big money in foster homes and big money buys you fancy lawyers who can draft legislation and slick lobbyists who know how to sell it to MPs. You can't make money out of foster homes without kids to foster, so you hire expert psychologists and doctors to put forward your assertion that Parents Must Be Perfect Or Suffer The Consequences and that fostering children is good for them - Hell, all children should be fostered!
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And in a council flat in Peckham social workers and police forcibly remove a day old infant from her parents because her mother has a history of depression and insisted upon an unassisted home birth.
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[TordelBack]

I can't argue with your examples of incidents, and I certainly wouldn't dispute that awful things happen once fallible people and brainless blame-phobic hierarchies get involved.  However, I don't want to live in a society which views what goes on behind closed doors as nobody's business but the pater familias: my own country blithely condoned spousal and child abuse since its inception, not to mention proudly handing over its women and children to almost inconceivable institutional evil.  That there are now people charged with protecting the vulnerable rather than ignoring or punishing them is a good thing, however much we would wish they never screwed up.  For me it's a case of needing to do it better, rather than not doing it all.

[The Legendary Shark]

I completely agree that we must do better.
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Here again, though, we hit the same old wall: "I'm afraid we just don't have the budget for that."
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Social money creation. It's the only way. Do that and we can do better everywhere.

[TordelBack]

Best thing you'll read today, from the wonderful Grayson Perry:  http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/10/grayson-perry-rise-and-fall-default-man

(Aside: my life and home are infested with endless repetitive bits of broken pottery, and Perry's work makes the medium fresh and exciting for me, so I'm well-disposed to him from the start, for all that he is rather more an Uncle Tom-ish part of what he rails against than he might let on...).

[TordelBack]

Best thing you'll read today...

Uhh, other than Prog 1902, obviously.

-keeps weather eye for Rigellian Hotshot-

[Dandontdare]

It is a slippery slope. There may very well be a common law justification to take an infant away from its parents in extreme cases and as a last resort but more and more families are being split up because its easier and makes more money for the state.
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If a family struggling to make ends meet (to pay for their own slavery) implodes and takes it out on a child, that is a deplorable crime worthy of punishment. So money is pumped into investigations and court cases and expert witnesses and care centres and foster homes and all that. Just a fraction of that expense, a fraction of all that resource, if put into easing the struggling family's burden, carrying some of the weight, I think far more could be achieved. Moreso if the professional social workers on the ground have more say than political and corporate policy makers.
.
In England, secret family courts are held quite regularly and many children are taken from their families never to be seen again. Some are sure to end up in very dark places indeed if recent news coverage is to be believed.
.
Like many government projects, the DSS has been perverted into a cash machine - once again taking something good and poisoning it from the head down. There's big money in foster homes and big money buys you fancy lawyers who can draft legislation and slick lobbyists who know how to sell it to MPs. You can't make money out of foster homes without kids to foster, so you hire expert psychologists and doctors to put forward your assertion that Parents Must Be Perfect Or Suffer The Consequences and that fostering children is good for them - Hell, all children should be fostered!
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And in a council flat in Peckham social workers and police forcibly remove a day old infant from her parents because her mother has a history of depression and insisted upon an unassisted home birth.
.

Sorry Sharky, but this time you're talking bollocks. I know a lot of stressed, underpaid and idealistic people who work in social services and child protection and your interpretation of their work is frankly insulting. They're not snatching children for profit, they are fighting tooth and nail to rescue children from appalling neglect and cruelty.

[Tiplodocus]

And the Social Workers I know often state that they often have to keep families together as much as possible; attempting to fix a broken family is preferable (and a better long term solution) than ripping it apart.

[The Legendary Shark]

Of course they are, DDD. I firmly believe that the vast majority of social workers are doing the best they can in every sense. But their good works are being perverted - not all the time, to be sure, nor even for the majority of the time but for a significant time.
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Those social workers and entrepreneurs involved in the social care industry are all human beings and will act accordingly. Most, I think, will be there due to a genuine human desire to do good. Some will be there to make a profit and a few will be attracted to the industry for other reasons entirely.
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In what I laughingly call my researches I have come across many articles and reports that ask some uncomfortable questions and describe some uncomfortable cases around this issue.
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I wonder how many unsavoury practices in the past have been sold to us as that nebulous phenomena of "Satanic Abuse" to cover up the activities of some perverts with access to parts of the system?
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My point is that splitting up a family, and especially taking children away, must be a last resort and I'd wager most social workers would agree with that idea, at least in general. If children must be taken away, however, that process must be whiter than white and as well funded as the armed forces. Families are the core of society and we must make it easier for them to learn and thrive. We have to ease the pressure on everyone - that would be a good start to keeping families together, I think.
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Turning social services over to private industry is not a wise thing to do. I know that "battery borstals" don't exist but I'll bet there's more than one wealthy sociopath out there who'd run one if he could get away with it - and more than one dedicated social worker who'd move mountains to shut it down.
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I know I tend to look on the black side, seeing the worst in a thing, and tend to ignore the fact that the majority of human beings in any organisation are basically just and honest, wanting only what's best for themselves and others. Whilst this is a great strength, and arguably our greatest asset on the path to freedom, it also gives us a great weakness - a kind of moral blind-spot; you wouldn't do something that bad so you assume nobody else would, especially those closest and best known to you - at least not until you see proof. We all knew Jimmy Savile, after all. We all knew he was weird but we didn't know he was *that* weird. We, his audience, gave him a pass and chose not to see. Because we didn't look, the BBC didn't look and so the authorities didn't look. Nobody looked at what we all should have been able to see.
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Privatising the social care industry draws it into the shadows, where none of us can see even if we wanted to.  That's the danger I see, that's the cancer - not the social workers who are only following their hearts and their orders.
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[Dandontdare]

social workers are 'damned if they do, damned if they don't' - if a child is murdered by abusive parents there is an outcry as to why the signs were missed and why irresponsible social workers allowed it to happen. If they remove the child they're accused of ripping apart families.

There is an argument to be had about the resourcing of child protection services and private outsourcing of care homes, but the welfare of the child is the paramount concern of anybody working in the field - not only in their own personal approach (trust me, NOBODY goes into this area for the money) but also underpinned by law (the Children's Act)

[Old Tankie]

Being an old duffer, who can remember the outbreak of the AIDs panic and media coverage of the early 80s, I'm beginning to see parallels with the ebola situation.  Just seen on Sky News that a charity worker and her son have been banned from giving a talk at a school, because they've recently been in Sierra Leone.  Thousands of vulnerable people die every winter in this country through 'flu related illnesses, yet the media don't seem so keen to cover that.  Can we please keep the ebola situation in context.

[The Legendary Shark]

It's only a matter of time before someone suggests the possibility of ISIS child suicide bombers armed with ebola bombs running around rural Kent disguised in Hallowe'en costumes and looking for hospitals and supermarkets to go off in.
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Y'all don't forget to be afraid now. Look at the terrible threats and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...

[Frank]

a charity worker and her son have been banned from giving a talk at a school, because they've recently been in Sierra Leone

Even if the speaker was infected (and at the specific stage of the life cycle of the virus where she was able to pass it on to others), unless she licked or pissed on the front row of her audience there wouldn't be much chance of her making them ill. Nothing that exciting ever happened at my school assemblies.

Did you hear Grayson Perry's Reith Lectures, TordelBack?

[Steve Green]

It's only a matter of time before someone suggests the possibility of ISIS child suicide bombers armed with ebola bombs running around rural Kent disguised in Hallowe'en costumes and looking for hospitals and supermarkets to go off in.
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Y'all don't forget to be afraid now. Look at the terrible threats and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...

You just did.

[TordelBack]

Did you hear Grayson Perry's Reith Lectures, TordelBack?

I surely did.