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During my fieldwork not one social worker thought their local authority would or should pass a parenting assessment (as “corporate parent”). (Turned into a bit of a thread). https://twitter.com/louisetickle/status/1327381080392011778
Yet here we are. The rate of care applications (per 10,000) are rising every year - @MyCafcass. We as a profession are complicit with the myth that children are being ‘rescued’ from terrible families and then living fairy tale lives with foster carers.
A social worker explained to me that she simply could not think about the poor “care” experienced by children in the foster system because she wouldn’t remove any children if she thought about it.
But we need to think about it! And before I’m accused of seeking to condone child abuse I’m specifically referring to the families whose socioeconomic circumstances are interpreted as ‘neglect’.
The parents who, as a result of poor housing, no food, no heating, low wages, lack of work compatible with parenting, are stigmatised by a society and a system that blames and punishes people @ProfImogenTyler
Blames people for their mental health difficulties, their decline in physical health, their relationship difficulties under such stress, and denies them access to support under the guise of ‘personal responsibility’ or targets ‘help’ in the most unhelpful of ways @TracyShildrick
We know social workers are individualising materially experienced structural inequality; 10 times the likelihood of removal in the bottom 10% of deprived authorities than the top 10% - @CWIP_Research
We know that the ‘austerity’ agenda was a smoke screen for “radical social re-engineering” - @srpoverty
Yet we as a profession are complicit with this. We use language from the idealised imagined notion of what social work and the system is, rather than explicating the actualities and describing what is happening.
I’m not talking about more ‘practice uplift’ or ‘models of working’ aimed at individual social workers. I’m talking big conversations about a complete shift in the ways in which the profession has accompanied the culture of parent blame @Drtraceyjensen
