Social Services Quotes

“I didn't think that Herefordshire Social Services would be best pleased about me dumping a poorly socialised pre-teen with mind control powers on them.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer

“[Refers to 121 children taken into care in Cleveland due to suspected abuse (1987) and later returned to their parents]

Sue Richardson, the child abuse consultant at the heart of the crisis, watched as cases began to unravel:
“All the focus started to fall on the medical findings; other supportive evidence, mainly which we held in the social services department, started to be screened out. A situation developed where the cases either were proven or fell on the basis of medical evidence alone. Other evidence that was available to the court, very often then, never got put. We would have had statement from the child, the social workers and the child psychologist’s evidence from interviewing. We would have evidence of prior concerns, either from social workers or teachers, about the child’s behaviour or other symptoms that they might have been showing, which were completely aside from the medical findings. (Channel 4 1997)
Ten years after the Cleveland crisis, Sue Richardson was adamant that evidence relating to children’s safety was not presented to the courts which subsequently returned those children to their parents:
“I am saying that very clearly. In some cases, evidence was not put in the court. In other cases, agreements were made between lawyers not to put the case to the court at all, particularly as the crisis developed. Latterly, that children were sent home subject to informal agreements or agreements between lawyers. The cases never even got as far as the court. (Channel 4, 1997)”
Nor is Richardson alone. Jayne Wynne, one of the Leeds paediatricians who had pioneered the use of RAD as an indicator of sexual abuse and who subsequently had detailed knowledge of many of the Cleveland children, remains concerned by the haphazard approach of the courts to their protection.
I think the implication is that the children were left unprotected. The children who were being abused unfortunately returned to homes and the abuse may well have been ongoing. (Channel 4 1997)”
― Heather Bacon, Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas

“Most of the institutions that come in to offer help after disaster don't have the resources to provide concrete help. . . . Donor communities invest billions funding peace talks and disarmament. Then they stop. The most important part of postwar help is missing: providing basic social services to people. Not having those resources might have been a reason men went to war in the first place; they crossed a border and joined an armed group because they didn't have jobs. In Liberia right now, there are hundreds of thousands of unemployed young people, and they're ready-made mercenaries for wars in West Africa. You'd think the international community would be sensible enough to know they should work to change this. But they aren't.”
― Leymah Gbowee, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War

“It is often said that Vietnam was the first television war. By the same token, Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the media. By the summer of 1987 Cleveland had become above all, a hot media story. The Daily Mail, for example, had seven reporters, plus its northern editor, based in Middlesbrough full time. Most other news papers and television news teams followed suit.
What were all the reporters looking for? Not children at risk. Not abusing adults. Aggrieved parents were the mother lode sought by these prospecting journalists. Many of these parents were only too happy to tell — and in some cases, it would appear, sell— their stories. Those stories are truly extraordinary.

In many cases they bore almost no relation to the facts. Parents were allowed - encouraged to portray themselves as the innocent victims of a runaway witch-hunt and these accounts were duly fed to the public. Nowhere in any of the reporting is there any sign of counterbalancing information from child protection workers or the organisations that employed them. Throughout the summer of 1987 newspapers ‘reported’ what they termed a national scandal of innocent families torn apart. The claims were repeated in Parliament and then recycled as established ‘facts’ by the media. The result was that the courts themselves began to be paralysed by the power of this juggernaut of press reporting — ‘journalism’ which created and painstakingly fed a public mood which brooked no other version of the story. (p21)”
― Sue Richardson, Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas

“...Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the media...

Given that most of the hearings took place out of sight of the press, the following examples are taken from the recollection of child protection workers present in court. In one case, during a controversy that centred fundamentally around disputes over the meaning of RAD [reflex anal dilatation], a judge refused to allow ‘any evidence about children’s bottoms’ in his courtroom.

A second judge — hearing an application to have their children returned by parents about whom social services had grave worries told the assembled lawyers that, as she lived in the area, she could not help but be influenced by what she read in the press.
Hardly surprising then that child protection workers soon found courts not hearing their applications, cutting them short, or loosely supervising informal deals which allowed children to be sent back to parents, even in cases where there was explicit evidence of apparent abuse to be explained and dealt with. (p21)

[reflex anal dilatation (RAD): a simple clue which is suggestive of anal penetration from outside. It had been recognised as a valuable weapon in the armoury of doctors examining children for many decades and was endorsed by both the British Medical Association and the Association of Police Surgeons. (p18)]”
― Sue Richardson, Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas

“But nothing in my previous work had prepared me for the experience of reinvestigating Cleveland. It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County Council in the three short months of the summer of 1987. (p18)

The key to resolving the puzzle of Cleveland was the children. What had actually happened to them? Had they been abused - or had the paediatricians and social workers (as public opinion held) been over-zealous and plain wrong? Curiously — particularly given its high profile, year-long sittings and £5 million cost — this was the one central issue never addressed by the Butler-Sloss judicial testimony and sifting of internal evidence, the inquiry's remit did not require it to answer the main question. Ten years after the crisis, my colleagues and I set about reconstructing the records of the 121 children at its heart to determine exactly what had happened to them... (p19)

Eventually, though, we did assemble the data given to the Butler-Sloss Inquiry. This divided into two categories: the confidential material, presented in camera, and the transcripts of public sessions of the hearings. Putting the two together we assembled our own database on the children each identified only by the code-letters assigned to them by Butler-Sloss.
When it was finished, this database told a startlingly different story from the public myth. In every case there was some prima fade evidence to suggest the possibility of abuse. Far from the media fiction of parents taking their children to Middlesbrough General Hospital for a tummy ache or a sore thumb and suddenly being presented with a diagnosis of child sexual abuse, the true story was of families known to social services for months or years, histories of physical and sexual abuse of siblings and of prior discussions with parents about these concerns. In several of the cases the children themselves had made detailed disclosures of abuse; many of the pre-verbal children displayed severe emotional or behavioural symptoms consistent with sexual abuse. There were even some families in which a convicted sex offender had moved in with mother and children. (p20)”
― Sue Richardson, Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas

“One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don't have the funds to pay for social services, but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on. Republican lawmakers don't want to pay for $500 IUDs for low-income women, so they pay $17,000 for Medicaid births. They don't want to pay to reduce lead poisoning, even though that means paying for special education classes for years to come.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

“legal emancipation remains an empty shell if it does not include public services, social housing, and funding to ensure that women can leave domestic and workplace violence.”
― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto

“Big girls do cry.”
― Eskay Teel, Alice in Worcestershire

“I was scared and nearly choking when I bravely asked, ‘Are you a pros-ti-tute?’ I actually said it like that. I knew I was asking a question that might get me beaten up, and I had to force the three syllables to stumble off my tongue and bounce around innocently on the stainless-steel draining board while I waited for her reply.”
― Eskay Teel, Alice in Worcestershire

“Here in California, a few years ago voters passed an initiative intended to prevent illegal aliens from using our schools and hospitals. The courts have so far prevented this fantastically stupid law from being enforced, but what bothers me is, a majority of voting Californians thought it would be a really good idea to share our state with large numbers of sick, uneducated people. Of course, the true goal was to force the illegals out, but as long as there are jobs here--even dirty, ill-paid, dangerous jobs--needy people from other countries will come here. Best they maintain their health, and in doing so, maintain the public health. And best their children go to school and become the educated Americans that the country will need for a positive future.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“The anomalies in the field of social service sector can be regulated with strategic partnerships
and ethic-infused prioritized channelization of resources and appropriately devised practical
social policies.”
― Henrietta Newton Martin, SOCIAL POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT – A PRIMER:

“A number of years ago, 1944, Friedrich Hayek wrote this very influential book, The Road to Serfdom. He worried that the creation of the welfare state, a strong government helping individuals would lead to authoritarianism. We now know that he was wrong. If we look around the world, populism, authoritarianism is associated not with government doing too much, but doing too little.

By doing too little, it has given rise to discontent that threatens our democracy and threatens our ability to respond to the major challenges that we face.”
― Joseph Stiglitz