Harm to children and young people seems to be reported almost daily in the media – from the renewed interest in so-called grooming gangs, to tragic cases such as that of Logan Mwangi that horrify the entire UK for weeks at a time. These cases shock and disturb us, but when it comes to blaming someone, social workers can be painted as incompetent or unwilling to act to prevent harm to children. Rishi Sunak recently claimed social workers often “ignore” sexual abuse when it is reported to them. Prof Andrew Cooper suggests that the pain of knowing that children are harmed is too great to bear, and the perceived incompetence of social workers functions as a defence for society against having to tolerate this horrifying knowledge.
Names of children tragically killed by a known adult live on in our memories and populate images in the media. The case of Peter Connelly (known as Baby P) in Haringey, which came to public attention in 2008, is probably the best known. I was sacked from my position as Haringey’s director of education and children’s services by the then secretary of state for children, Ed Balls, on live TV. This was less than a month after Peter’s mother, her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s brother were convicted of “causing or allowing” his death. I was closely followed by four social workers and a paediatrician from Great Ormond Street children’s hospital (GOSH). The scapegoating and vilification of me and other social workers in this case and others has had many unintended consequences.
Other agencies involved in such cases have sophisticated strategies to avoid blame and protect their reputations. In the case of Peter’s death, Balls, Haringey council, Ofsted, GOSH and the Metropolitan police all benefited from having a convenient scapegoat to take the blame for wider and more complicated failures. I was able to use a judicial review to successfully have the decision of Balls and Haringey council to sack me deemed unfair, and overturned. As a result, I also received a large number of documents revealing the lengths parties went to in order to shift blame.
Balls’s department urged Ofsted to rapidly produce a report, which was eventually cited as evidence to sack me. The report was rewritten several times to focus more attention on me, and include more negative judgments. Balls had so much to lose in attacks from the Conservatives after 13 years in power. Years later, the journalist Nick Davies in his book Hack Attack (2014) reported that Rebekah Brooks, the then editor of the Sun, had reportedly threatened Balls that she would turn her petition with 1.4 million alleged signatories against me on him if he failed to sack me. Haringey council, for its part, was deeply compromised and knew it simply didn’t have the evidence to sack me. It followed Balls to act outside the law.
Later, reports emerged showing that the GOSH paediatrician who had seen Peter two days before he died was underqualified for the clinic in which she saw him. And crucial information was not revealed at a stage when it may have made a difference to the social workers.
But it was the actions of the Met that were the most extreme. The day before Peter died, the Met informed his mother it was no longer investigating her for incidents from two previous arrests on the advice of the CPS – a fact that got very little, if any, attention in the media. Instead, according to a 2014 BBC documentary, the Met reportedly briefed the media that negligent social workers were to blame.
But it was their efforts to avert an inquest for Peter that drew my close attention. Two critical Met internal reports, a critical unpublished report from Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary and the full report of the serious case review (initially unpublished) together told the story of the failures of the Met. The evidence suggests there was a serious breakdown of communication between different police teams, leading to “significant opportunities being missed” around safeguarding. This was very similar the case of the murdered schoolgirls in Soham, which led to the Bichard report in 2004 and major national reform of DBS checks.
The public pressure and opprobrium continued for months, until 2009 when Peter’s mother’s boyfriend, Steven Barker, received a life sentence for the rape of another young child, bringing closure to the public narrative. However, the legal scholar Margaret Jervis has suggested that the investigator’s reliance on a very young child witness, alleging a crime several years in the past, casts doubts on its veracity and on the conviction itself.
With no inquest for Peter and the life sentence for Barker, questions remain. And the scapegoating and vilification of social workers in this case and others has had many unintended consequences. Social work as a profession has become driven by a fear of failure – ultimately a fear of being vilified in the media and publicly humiliated. I believe this fear, alongside the impact of austerity policies, has driven up the number of children taken into the care of the state. The number of children in care in England has increased every year since 2008, and the total number in the UK is approximately 100,000. And while this figure rises, the number of children who become victims of child homicide – most often by a family member – has remained constant at one child a week on average, and substantially more when neglect is taken into account.
I don’t wish to reattribute blame. Rather, I want to draw attention to the potentially serious consequences of blame avoidance in powerful institutions, and how rapidly others can be scapegoated – often with the help of the public and the media. It is time for the country’s 100,000-plus social workers to put an end to this. We must educate the public and politicians about the realities of protecting children. And when accusations come, we must fight our cases through the courts.
Sharon Shoesmith is a former director of education and children’s social care, now working as a writer, researcher and public speaker. She is a guest on today’s episode of the podcast Finding Britain’s Ghost Children, on BBC Sounds
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