Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Robin McAlpine, head of strategic development at Common Weal
There is a lot of noise and fury in Scottish politics just now, but it must not be allowed to drown out the story of the care failures in the appalling "Beastie House" case . We must not shy away from facing the horrors of what happened and we have to make sure that the policy approach and mindset that let it happen are excised from public service with urgency.
I can't bring myself to recount the details of the case if you are not aware of them. The painful enough summary is that children were being horrifically sexually abused in a house in Glasgow but despite the clearly distraught girls begging for help, begging not to be left in the house, every single public official they dealt with effectively threw them back to their abuse.
The reasons this has happened are depressingly predictable. Over the last four years Common Weal has worked extensively on care issues and a number of our reports explain clearly how failures like this are "baked in" to our care system.
First, in the last 30 years there has been a seismic shift in attitudes to social work. Social work was a discipline focused on helping people who needed help. It was a unified service run by every local authority.
Since then social work has been re-conceived as a disciple which "manages troublesome people" and so social work has been broken up and fragmented across different services. There is now a social worker in the housing department for "troublesome tenants", a social worker in early year services for "troublesome families" and so on.
It has upended the ethics of social work, not only stripping it of resources but of some of its original moral purpose. Again and again in the Beastie House case we see social workers and education officials identifying the girls as "badly behaved" and treating them as a "disruptive problem" which had to be pacified.
This shocked us. One of the first rules of social work and child psychological services is that disruptive behaviour on the part of children is a giant red flag warning that something else may be very wrong in their lives. That is the opposite of how things were seen in this case
Another major problem is that social work has developed a serious social class bias. We have analysed how (for example) the system confuses "poor parents" and "poor parenting". There is little evidence to suggest that poor people make worse parents than middle class people other than as a result of their material circumstances, but that is often the mindset officials take.
Either conditions which would be considered intolerable in a middle class setting are excused because the people involved are poor, or expectations for outcomes for poor families are set well below the expectations for middle class families. That is utterly unacceptable.
Another horrifying aspect of this affair is that there is repeated evidence that officials gave more weight to trying to avoid a complaint from the parents and adults in the house (who are now all in jail for a long time) than trying to protect the children who were never really believed.
This too is par for the course in paperwork-heavy, risk-averse Scotland. The number one rule in public services in Scotland seems at times to be "cover your arse" and "make sure the paper trail leads to someone more junior than you".
All of this we could have predicted, but there are aspects of this case we simply do not understand. As our experts in the Care Reform Group instantly identified, it is the job of social work to make an immediate assessment of the environment in which the children were living. Even just the mugshots of the adults in the household as they were arrested should give enough reason for concern that this is a troubled and chaotic household, very possibly with substance abuse.
This assessment does not seem to have been properly made. In fact from top to bottom in this entire case, everyone involved gives you the impression that their main priority was to get home early with the minimum paperwork to deal with.
This cannot be allowed to happen again – but it will if there isn't change. The mindset that drove so much of this failure is embedded everywhere in the Scottish public sector. The agency empires which are supposed to deliver these services spend too much time trying to hide reasons for genuine concern. From health boards to local authorities to care homes, over and over scandals are covered up and it takes years to uncover details.
If there is to be change it has to start from the top. The care system in Scotland is gummed up with incredible backlogs of suspended staff waiting for adjudication on allegations of poor practice, but this is almost always care workers on minimum wage expected to deliver more than they have time to deliver. The managers responsible for this system almost never pay a price.
Until there are personal consequences for failures of this magnitude, no-one has an incentive to do anything other than keep covering their tracks. Until we de-fragment and de-bureaucratise care and stop making so much of it a profit-making exercise in "how little can we get away with delivering from public funding?", this will keep happening.
And until the top-down, paternalistic and often disinterested attitude of senior officials changes, we will keep getting situations like this. Culture eats strategy for breakfast ...
You should care about this. We all should. It's not just those poor children, its that any one of us could suddenly need care at any minute. We are only one car accident away from being reliant on home help to feed us.
The Scottish Government has made a terrible mistake by abandoning work on a National Care Service and downgrading care in Cabinet. Care can literally be the difference between life and death, or a childhood spent laughing and playing or being sexually abused.
We as a society failed those children. We cannot turn away from it now.
