Child protection

Everyone on my course was told to watch Protecting Our Children, which is a three part series on the BBC at present. I haven't watched it yet, I'm not very well and I didn't feel like being hideously depressed right before bed last night!

However, a lot of people have watched it and were shocked at the contents.
These are people about to start a university level course in health and social care. For the next nine months, they're going to be reading case studies, asked difficult ethical questions and it's not always going to be jolly outcomes and happy endings.

Now, while it's fairly obviously going to be a shocking documentary or there wouldn't be a lot of point airing it, the cases broadcast were nothing particularly abnormal for child protection social work.

I used to work in NHS admin, doing notes summarising, which meant I frequently came into contact with child protection case conference notes. I have read some dreadful things, that I cannot give examples of to protect confidentiality.
There are four main types of child abuse recognised by child protection - neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse and sexual abuse. As you can imagine, there is often some crossover between categories. Neglect is by far the most common, and probably the hardest to read about in a clinical setting because there is no terminology to hide behind. If you're fairly ignorant of medical terminology, a 'torn fourchette' in a six year old girl won't read as anything terribly shocking (it is). However, reading or hearing about the same girl being left alone for whole days and nights without food, ignored and having to sleep without blankets on the floor, you can't fuzz that out mentally.

Working in a quiet, small, rural practice for eight years, I came across case conference reports across all four of categories of abuse, to varying degrees of severity, and it never ceased to chill me to the bone. I had to fight to not take my work home with me mentally every time.

I am under no illusions. Parents and other caregivers can do terrible things to their children. Maybe the real problem that social workers face in this country, aside from funding issues and archaic communication systems with other agencies, is that the general public prefer to ignore that child abuse still goes on.

The same people baying for the blood of the social workers involved with Baby P would probably rather poke out their eyes than admit similar abuse might be going on in THEIR village.