Breathing Excercises

The best way to describe the differences between child welfare in the UK vs US is this: Our pros are their cons, and their cons are our pros.

I have been thrown in a department where cohesiveness and common sense are as foreign to them as to words chav and bloke are to americans. [BTW: Chav- a hoe, Bloke: a man]. As mentioned in my previous blog, there is only 1 manager with a permanent position and the rest are locum. Since they come and go as they please, they really dont have a sense of commitment or responsibility for the welfare of their team.

I am putting that aside however because granted, no social service agency is perfect, especially when it comes to management. The front line workers will always feel like management has no clue, and management will always feel like the front line workers have no clue. It is what it is.

What is alarming to me however, is how high the threshold for abuse is in this country. In the states, if I felt like a child was in immediate danger all I had to do was make a phone call to my supervisor, the attorney, and thats it. The child comes with me. Here? HELL NO. We leave the child in the home, try to persuade the manager to allow us to get a court date, get a court date that is weeks away, and ask permission to the parents if we can take their child in custody. Yes. You read it. We have to ASK THE PARENTS for every and anything. If they dont feel like they can benefit from our services, case closed. My jaw fell to the floor and shattered in pieces when I realized that everything here is about parental consent. I cannot speak, do, touch, see, hear, smell, feel nothing without the consent of the parent. As someone else said it, "we are their professional secretary." Its a croc of shit.

Now, there isnt much I can do about changing the law. As I said before, it is what it is. The reason that Croydon is like this is because there is such a large transient population that they kind of have to raise the threshold b/c if not, we'd have SO MANY children in care. We need to take cultural differences in mind when it comes to corporal punishment.

Put aside the management, put aside the law, the Assessments team is still in disarray. As I reviewed charts I kept reading assessments that made absolutely no sense for the safety and concern of the child. There are are blatant obvious reasons why a child is misbehaving but they havent seemed to make that connection. For example, Ill see two sentences in an assessment that goes like this: "The mother's new boyfriend is said to be physically and mentally abusive to the child. The child has been misbehaving in school and frequently runs away from home. The child states he doesnt not want to go home because his mother does not love him. The mother request for his behavior to improve otherwise she will place him in care" ..........

Let me take a real deep breath here because if I read one more assessment that has that kind of stupidity attached to it, I'm going to scream. It does not take a degree in SW to figure out WHY this child is misbehaving. Yet, the case plans all revolve around making the life for the parents easier. Lets diagnosis this child with antisocial behavior [the UK version of Oppositional Defiant Disorder]. Lets call the police on him when he doesnt come home. Lets put him in counselor. How about we open our eyes and use our common sense in figuring out that this boy doesnt want to go home because his mom's boyfriend is beating him. How about you take your own words and do something with it! I have read so many files that sound like the above and it seems like the obvious deduction of the child's behavior just goes over their heads because we cant piss the parents off. If the parents dont like our assesssment, time to rewrite it!

Another deep breath.


I have so much more to write but I'm starting to feel my blood boil right about now so Ill just save that for another day.