Children first
Sir: It is always open season for sniping at social workers, so Alasdair Palmer's article held few surprises (`The state stole their children', 9 January). However, the picture he draws of incompetent, uncaring social workers operating within a legal system loaded against the client bears little rela- tionship to the real world, in my experience of professional practice in a West Country city. Mr Palmer gives the impression that the Children Act 1989 has made little dif- ference to the way in which social workers operate, and claims that social workers' opinions 'continue to go unchallenged in the courts'. Moreover he casts an extraordi- nary slur on the independence of child psy- chiatrists and paediatricians by stating that almost all medical opinions are based on medical evidence collected by social work- ers and that child psychiatrists frequently produce court reports without seeing the child or family concerned.
On this latter point I can only say that in 14 years of practice I have never come across a court psychiatric report based entirely on second-hand evidence, and without at least one consultation with the child and family concerned. Medical evi- dence similarly is always produced indepen- dently, since social workers are clearly not qualified to make medical judgments. In the scheme of things, medical evidence is generally more highly regarded than social worker evidence — we're pretty low down in the professional hierarchy, after all. As to the alleged powerlessness of the child and parents, even before the introduction of the Children Act every child coming before the courts has had the opportunity
to be represented both by a solicitor who specialises in family law and a Guardian ad [item (GAL), i.e. a social worker not employed by the local authority in the case. No solicitor, barrister or GAL would fail to challenge a medical or psychiatric report prepared without personal consultation with the child or family. Legal aid is also available for the preparation of alternative medical evidence if this is considered advis- able by the child's representatives or the GAL.
As for the changes introduced by the Children Act, dismissed somewhat cavalier- ly by Mr Palmer, there is unfortunately no space to detail all the positive changes here. Suffice it to say that it is unthinkable that the case he describes would (on the face of it) have occurred under the new law, which abolished the overused wardship jurisdic- tion as a means of bringing a child into care without recourse to the magistrates' court. The new Act incorporates the principle of 'judicial non-interference' (S1.(5)):
a court ... shall not make the order, or any of the orders, unless it considers that doing so would be better for the child than making no order at all.
In the case in point it is doubtful that an order would have been made since the child's difficulties were genetic.
Finally, I would challenge the assumption that many social workers are 'in their early twenties and thirties and without families themselves'. The vast majority of social workers are mature people with families, not young childless ingenus: not of course that parenthood should automatically qual- ify anyone for the job of social worker (or even gynaecologist). What happened to the ‘Maggs' family was clearly both unjust and tragic, but it is an extreme and untypical case. I hope that the parents keep on fight- ing for contact with their children since even adoption is no longer a bar to continu- ing contact with birth parents. Hard cases make bad law, and hard examples draw a misleading and out of date picture of a pro- fession struggling to do a job with more stress than financial reward and little respect shown for their efforts from either The Spectator or the Sun.
Dawn Cunningham
5 Trinity Parade, Frome, Somerset
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