Reading ‘The Report of the Independent Child Death Review Group’ and seeing the oh so obvious reactions to it, has proven to be a rather frustrating experience. No, not frustrating, the reactions have made me sick to my stomach. I just can’t decide who appalls me more, the ignorant or the ideologues. Taken together, I can only describe the reactions as being, in general, self-indulgent buffoonery.
If we were a truly rational society, we would impose a decade long moratorium on reproduction, so we could decide what values and science we all agree to apply to the care of our children. What values and science we all agree to pay for and to monitor and what values and science we agree to pay to have monitored. Of course, even if we were to do something that radical, I would be very surprised if what that decade long exercise in navel-gazing produced, would be very much different from what we have today.
And what do we have today? We have a system of Child Protection based on charity i.e. alleviating and ameliorating the very worst, but essentially leaving things as they are. There is nothing wrong with that. We produce children because of animal desire and future economic need. There is no all-encompassing authority which says we must raise said children in emotional and physical luxury.
We pay lip service to the primacy of family, because statistically, a child does best in their family. Of corse, statistically the family is also the most dangerous environment for a child. So while I’m all for putting the boot into the Catholic Church for hiding rapists, let’s not forget that their Fathers did not ‘get at’ as many children as biological parents did and do.
And therein lays the most profound fallacy about Child Protection in this country. People think it is about finding the pedophiles. If only it was that simple. In truth the greatest enemy to a child’s welfare in this country, is poverty. It is this immovable object which so confounds Social Workers and their fellow professionals in Child Protection.
It is why we are content to keep our Child Protection system as reactive, as opposed to proactive, as possible. We are not looking for grand changes. Just keep the deaths down and the media focussed elsewhere. It’s not that we are heartless, it’s more that poverty is complicated. How does one even define it? And once defined, which method best eliminates it? Can it even be eliminated? How much will this cost? Why are we spending so much money, if we are not even sure we can eliminate it?
There is talk of a Constitutional Amendment which will elevate the rights of a Child to, at least, the level of the Family. This may make it easier to get recalcitrant Judges on-side, but I seriously doubt that there will be a Constitutional Amendment which guarantees a child’s right to never witness or experience disaffection, poverty, powerlessness, expendability and expediency.
Nor do I imagine a Constitutional Amendment will enshrine the principal that if a Public Servant fails to do their job to an agreed standard, they will be disciplined, even sacked, and their Union will facilitate this process rather than frustrate it. The ability of our State to intervene, fruitfully in the lives of our children is stymied by a lack of funding. That’s OK. Only a very small minority of Irish citizens would agree to the tax changes required to address that deficit. We do however, spend some money.
Money which this report shows was spent on incompetence, both individual and systemic. I’m not saying we should fire a bunch of Social Workers. No, I’m saying we should fire a bunch of Social Workers, Social Care Workers, Care Assistants, Doctors, Nurses, Teachers, Psychologists, Gardaí, Judges, Solicitors, Barristers, Politicians and sundry Civil Servants. Every profession in this list, makes some money due to their interaction with children. Do members of these professions routinely lose their jobs or even face serious disciplinary action because of shortcoming in their professional interactions with children? No, they don’t?
This is not because we don’t value children. We obviously don’t value them, but even if we did value children enough to put them at the head of the resource queue, our efforts would still be in vain because we suffer from another value. The value of non-accountability. A nasty nexus of mismanagement, Union amorality, political cowardice and conflicting aims allow precious resources bleed from our Social Services, meaning that what little we do allocate for the protection of children, is further reduced.
OK, perhaps firing a few thousand losers is a bit much, a bit ideologuey. I’m not anti Public Servants, be they Social Workers or pen pushers. I’m paid from the Public Purse and for ten years I worked with children who were in Residential Care. I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who works with children. It is a dangerous, thankless, stressful and often deeply unpleasant job. Everyone who works in that area knows that in the grand scheme of things, they are merely perpetuating a system of intergenerational damage and dependency. So one must focus on the individuals or risk insanity. One must embrace each individual horror story (and please know they are horror stories) because to contemplate the vileness that one cannot rescue too many children from, is to burn out, is to ingest bitterness.
Only the mad and the naive believe we will ever spend the kind of money required to keep all children safe, happy, content and fully equipped with the emotional wherewithal to live their life to its potential. To even suggest the possibility is silly and so bedeviled with ideology that I doubt one could even get a consensus on what ‘safe’ means. As for the other three? Well, good luck with that.
What I think we can safely agree on, is that a Social Worker should maintain records to an agreed standard or risk censure. We can agree that the death of every child should be fully investigated and statistics collated, be they in or out of the notice of the HSE. We can agree that the in camera rule may be protecting the identify of an individual child, but it is blinding the entire Child Protection field, professional and academic, to what is happening to children in the Courts.
We can agree, because it was agreed nearly 20 years ago, that any Child who comes into the Care of the State should have an individual Care Plan. A Plan that is regularly assessed by a multi-disciplinary team. We can agree, or should agree, that the Professional Standards that professions such as Social Worker and Teacher and Doctor and Judge, apply to themselves in theory, should actually be applied in practice. And we surely can agree that anyone who aspires to a management position in any of the Child Protection Professions should be able to recognise as failing, any Professional they have responsibility for. And once recognised they should be able to support and if necessary terminate their employment. The job is just too important and too poorly resourced for bloody amateurs to be continually endured.
