Trial By Media

[jacqui d]

"Them" are a wonderful bunch, they take all the falls for a society who has learned to turn a blind eye to what matters and concentrates on the trivial lives on celebrities

[Carole Stitcher]

"Them" are a wonderful bunch, they take all the falls for a society who has learned to turn a blind eye to what matters and concentrates on the trivial lives on celebrities

 

I agree in part, we've become a society who blame everyone but ourselves for our misfortunes.

 

We all make mistakes and bad choices throughout our lives and its how we deal with them that determines our strength of character.

 

But there are times when 'they' are at fault. When they take on responsibility and fail to fulfill it, not through the odd mistake or bad choice, but by being totally negligent in their duties. We can only stop this by making those that are negligent take the consequences of their action/inaction.

 

When it comes to our fascination with celebrities you're absolutely right, but that's one of the reasons that their public behaviour should be of reasonable standard, because 'monkey do what monkey see'. I couldn't care less if Russell Brand and Andrew Sachs' grandaughter slept with the entire household cavalry, separately or together, just as long as both of them keep their private business private.

[Melp]

Given that many men can be avaricious sexual predators, maybe all women should know better than to go out dressed provocatively, or drink too much, as they may end up getting raped. Same principle here, blaming the woman for the appalling behaviour of a man.

 

 

 

This raises an interesting point in my eyes. Did Brand contravene her human rights by announcing so publicly that he had slept with her? Or can he claim the media defence of it being in the public interest?

 

 

 

 

With all due respect Melp, in my honest opinion those two words contribute a great deal to the state of the society we live in today.

 

Lets consider for a moment what it might be like if more people actually cared about even the small wrongs that don't actually impact on their personal lives.

 

More parents would care where their children are at all times of the day and night, so they wouldn't be hanging around the streets, getting involved with gangs, drugs, guns and whatever else. Children could then walk home from football training without tragic consequences.

 

More people might care about what's happening outside their own front door, so maybe, just maybe, something more could have been done to save Baby P from his suffering.

 

Maybe the 7 year old child and her mother that live with us (not relatives, long story) would be able to read and write. They're not stupid, in fact the 7 year old is well above average, but both have been failed by the system and by everyone they have come in contact with and that includes social services.

 

Maybe I wouldn't have felt today that I had to hide away my two beautiful natured staffy crosses from the policewoman who came to take a witness statement from my OH. If more people cared about what's right and what's wrong, the DDA in its current form would not exist and they would not be in danger of being considered 'type'.

 

 

 

Sonia Shoesmith is a senior manager. Her job is to ensure that the people who staff her department do what they are supposed to. Whether that is through discipline or support, it is her job to supply that, through the chain, to the people who were directly involved with Baby P. She obviously didn't, so she is no less responsible than anyone else.

 

And sorry to disagree with you Kats Inc., but the legislation allowed children in Cleveland and many other places to be placed in care unnecessarily, so that is no defence of the situation in my eyes.

 

 

Men are not the only sexual predators. Many women are too. However that is not the issue. The point I was making with my comment "Who cares" was that there is famine, war, death and destruction everywhere yet the focus for what seems like weeks now has been 2 radio presenters who screwed up and upset some people. No-one died as a result, just some hurt feelings [and yes I agree they behaved badly but is it really the big deal its been made out to be?]

I'm not blaming the woman for Brands behaviour, I blame them both. She slept with someone who is well known for boasting of his conquests. He boasted of it. Why is anyone surprised? He behaved in exactly the way people expect him to behave-atrociously but did senior staff really need to lose jobs over it? There are far more important things going on in the world surely.

 

Carole please do not quote me out of context. I said who cares in regards to the Brand/Ross saga NOT to the death of a child or the problems in the world. You were unafir to make the assumption that I don't care about those matters and I take exception to being talked down to.

 

I know exactly where my children are 24/7 and happen to care very very much what they're up to, what they watch on TV and the PC etc. I don't consider myself the worlds best parent [far from it] but my kids are safe and loved. So are the children of every other parent I know.

 

I do happen to care whats happening outside my own front door and would be one of the first to be knocking if I'd not seen a neighbour for a couple of days, or saw a child being mistreated etc. Coming from the background I did, I know EXACTLY what its like to have no-one looking out for your welfare.

[social services as it happens were very good though things they failed to spot were well hidden and not their fault]

 

Don't even go there on the DDA. I've not worked my socks off for the last 20 odd months for nothing. We all know the failings and some of us are trying our damndest to do something about it.

 

I'm not going to defend Sonia Shoesmith. The whole department failed in this case but the ultimate responsibility lies with the parents. Ther would be no need for Social Services if parents looked after their kids properly in the first place.

[Rudi]

I felt sorry for Andrew Sachs' in the whole Ross/Brand thing, I doubt any grandfather wants to hear about his granddaughter's sex life but his granddaughter isn't a shy little wallflower and I can't find any sympathy for her at all - she was on TV the other day being interviewed, lapping up the attention and oohing and ahhing over how amazing it was that famous people now knew who she was, completely self-obsessed and hardly a victim of human rights abuse. I don't believe that the head of Radio 2 and another executive should have stepped down over it. It was blown out of all proportion.

[boosboss]

The Ross/Brand/Sachs incident just gave a lot of people with too much time on their hands something else to get involved in and be affronted by, even though only two of the complainants had even listened to the show. Thousands of people sticking their oar in (just like I'm doing now? Yep!) When real life issues such as the collapse in the banking world, which will affect us all was being treated as just another news item! Madness! The government bankrolling the failing banks at our expense. Golden handshakes, secure bonuses, etc. Nothing we can do though! Yesterdays news, todays chip paper!

 

Re Baby P. The reason there are professionals is because society doesn't work without them to protect the vunerable. With all the best will in the world, having a grumble over the garden gate doesn't alter events. Getting involved has it's limits, even the Social worker/whistle blower getting involved in the councils strategy didn't change a thing! All the backbiting and blaming won't alter the fact that Baby P died and until the Government and in it's shoes, Social Services take responsibility for the vunerable fully. It'll happen again.

 

Mistakes will be made in the future, but let's hope they're errors on the side of caution!

 

121 Cleveland children removed from 57 families in 1987! Harsh mistake! 121 children alive!

 

Jasmine Beckford

Tyra Henry

Victoria Climbie

Baby P

 

Lesson learned?

[Kats inc]

Mistakes will be made in the future, but let's hope they're errors on the side of caution!

 

121 Cleveland children removed from 57 families in 1987! Harsh mistake! 121 children alive!

 

Jasmine Beckford

Tyra Henry

Victoria Climbie

Baby P

 

Lesson learned?

 

Nope fraid not.

 

Interesting read for those that feel they can face it Beyond Blame

 

Seems we're taught the same lesson over and over but we just don't learn it

[Rudi]

I watched a documentary where lots of children were taken - can't remember where - by social services when they were convinced that there was a satanic ring going on. The children were interviewed as adults and were very bitter, to the point where some had been unable to form lasting relationships and were very unhappy. They were treated appallingly by their 'saviours', I remember one woman saying that her mother had taken her out to buy her new winter coat a few days before and she'd chosen a red one and loved it, when she was taken by social services, her clothes, including this red coat were bundled into a bag and she was told they were to be burnt. She was then put in a bath and scrubbed until her skin was raw. Pretty abusive in itself really. The programme was awful because nobody listened to anything but what they wanted to hear, terribly sad for the children and parents involved.

 

I don't know the answers but social services can't go in gung ho any more than it can just stand back and wait for enough evidence to surface. Children shouldn’t be damaged by a system that’s supposed to protect them but where's the middle ground?

 

I think that the problem of protecting children when they have parents who either don't do this themselves or are active in the abuse is too much for one agency, IMO the biggest problem is that agencies do not work well together. Sometimes they do, but often multi-agency working is just a catchy phrase that people bandy about and it ticks certain boxes on measurement scales. Agencies don't talk to each other, whether that's through possessiveness, thinking they know it all or being precious about information, too busy or just plain not bothered, and children continue to fall through the gaps, whether it's Baby P who dies or a child who loses out at school because his special needs go undiagnosed and not acted upon. One group will dismiss the opinion of another group, even in areas that are not their specialism which I find extraordinary in some cases. You can put services together in one room and they still don't always work together. The GPs don't inform social services, social services doesn't talk to the teachers, the teachers don't talk to the mental health workers and so it goes on and on.

 

Everyone does things differently too - there's no nationally agreed way of tackling the problems that face children. Schools all do it differently, so do mental health trusts, so does social services etc. How can the government hope to measure or monitor what's going on when none of it is standardised? What’s going on in one borough of London will be different to how it’s done in the next. It’s mad. People move jobs, even from a county team to a city team in one area and things are vastly different, so they play catch up while their workload piles up. I think it should all be transferable from region to region, you're always going to have some differences perhaps in the services that are available - an inner city area with a high population of, say, refugee children, is going to have different needs to a more rural area but the processes should be the same for getting children the help they need in whatever area. The policies are out there, but there's no onus for services and agencies to implement them. There's people on huge salaries who oversee all this stuff but it doesn't get done. Lots of money is spent on research but, again, quite often nothing comes from it. We had a huge multi-million pound project going looking at homeless youngsters, but the charity involved screwed it up, spent the money where it wasn't supposed to, had to sack the workers involved with the youths because the money ran out and all the work was for nothing with kids left in limbo - but no-one at the charity answered for it - the only people who lost out were the youngsters who could have benefited from what was proving to be a really good scheme.

[Carole Stitcher]

Melp, I certainly didn't mean to talk down to you, and if my post gave that impression, please accept my sincere apologies .

 

Nor were my comments about considering what it would be like if more people cared meant personally and I'm surprised they were taken as such. Nobody could ever doubt that you care about those issues.

 

I agree that she should have had more sense than to sleep with him, I also think women should have more sense than to go out in skimpy clothing and get p****d. That doesn't give him the licence to behave that way, Ross the licence to egg him on the way he did, or the BBC the licence to broadcast it, especially when they had the opportunity not to, any more than a man has the licence to rape a half dressed, half-cut woman. The fact that she has probably done more to embarrass her grandfather since the incident still doesn’t condone the actions of all involved.

 

The managers at the BBC went because they made an extremely poor editorial decision which had huge repercussions. I think it was right that they went, the same as I think that the seniors at the banks who took such stupid risks should go, without the benefit of any kind of golden handshake. I also think that a good many of the people who were involved with the Baby P case should go.

 

Did the Ross/Brand fiasco deserve the coverage that it has had? To be honest, I don’t know.

 

I'm a bit of a Ray Mallon on these type of things - zero tolerance.

 

I don’t care what anyone does as long as it doesn’t have an adverse effect on the lives of others. I do care about bad manners and disrespect, at any level, in any circumstance. I don’t have children, but I do care if children are harmed in any way by the action or inaction of others. I don’t live in any of the countries that are torn apart by wars, or suffering from drought, earthquakes, disease, but I do care about the conditions that the people who do live there are having to endure. I care about doing anything to the best of my ability, no matter how trivial the task.

 

Too many people don’t care about anything at all, they have no standards, they only give a damn about what affects them. They make life much more difficult for those who do care and who do have standards. We all know that the DDA is not fair and is not right. We care. I would care whether I had bull breeds or not, many people on this forum don’t have them and still care, which is why you get the support you do here. If the same proportion of the British public were to stand up and say that its not right and its not fair, the DDA would be repealed and something far more appropriate put in its place. But most of them don’t care, they don’t have a bull breed, they don’t even have a dog, it doesn’t affect them, so it doesn’t matter. I’ve used that as an example because its close to your heart and you’ve worked hard to put it right, but the principle is the same with all issues.

 

If the social workers at Haringay had put one tenth of the effort into doing what they are paid to do that you do into DNB for nothing, Baby P would still be here and safe. Just how much could you do with Sharon Shoesmiths’ salary at your disposal? (not to mention all the others). How much more could Kats Inc achieve if she was supported by those people she liaises with instead of wasting her energies trying to force them to do what they are supposed to be doing anyway?

 

People not caring is, in my opinion, the root cause of most social problems and the fact that we are willing to accept poor standards allows it to continue.

 

 

Boosboss, I’m afraid that its not that simple. The children in Cleveland were not at risk, but untold damage was done to them by the very people who were there to protect them. I think the incident that Rudi cites occurred in the Shetlands, you can see by what she says what damage was done. They are not the only incidences and they still happen today, but the scale tends to be smaller.

 

Rudi, what an excellent post, very informative.

 

I agree with you, and Kats Incs posts seem to confirm that for whatever reason, these agencies who are so crucial to the welfare of so many vulnerable people are totally resistant to using their mouths and ears in the proportion that they have been given them.

 

Kats Inc, you and I have disagreed on many issues in the past, its nice to have an issue where you and I are singing, if not on the same hymn sheet, at least one that is pretty similar. I have enormous respect for you, believe it or not, because you do care about what you do. I only wish that there were more like you and fewer like the ones who are frustrating your efforts. I sincerely hope that you are never caught up in an incident like Baby P, you certainly don’t deserve to.

[owl]

Just a point in passing: the Shetland and I believe also the Cleveland incidents were triggered by the activities of certain social workers with a particular agenda, to stamp out ritual satanic abuse, who had links with a fundamentalist organisation active at that time. This organisation contributed to the death of one poor young woman with psychiatric problems, and was basically a witch-hunt.

 

Can't give you any links, it's too far back. I knew a bit about the Shetland incident as the family alleged to be at the centre of this satanic cult were Quakers, and at that time I had a lot of contact with the Society of Friends. The incident was horrific, there was a raid and the children were carried off screaming, and put through terrifying interrogations to try to extract statements.

 

I'm wondering if these incidents have made Social Services generally too over-cautious, when in fact they were sparked off by unstable and obsessed individuals and are unlikely to happen again.

[scotslass]

Just a point in passing: the Shetland and I believe also the Cleveland incidents were triggered by the activities of certain social workers with a particular agenda, to stamp out ritual satanic abuse, who had links with a fundamentalist organisation active at that time. This organisation contributed to the death of one poor young woman with psychiatric problems, and was basically a witch-hunt.

 

Can't give you any links, it's too far back. I knew a bit about the Shetland incident as the family alleged to be at the centre of this satanic cult were Quakers, and at that time I had a lot of contact with the Society of Friends. The incident was horrific, there was a raid and the children were carried off screaming, and put through terrifying interrogations to try to extract statements.

 

I'm wondering if these incidents have made Social Services generally too over-cautious, when in fact they were sparked off by unstable and obsessed individuals and are unlikely to happen again.

 

Is this the Orkney case, Owl? Here's an US link, since the British press was limited in what they (or UK Friends) could report.

 

http://www.afriendlyletter.com/afl121.html

 

It was a truly disgraceful episode.

[owl]

Yes, it was Orkney not Shetland of course. Thanks for the USA link. It was a truly horrible affair, and the activities of the anti-cultists had some alarming parallels with the 17thC witchfinders.

[chuckey-lee]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7758897.stm

 

I'm sorry but my feelings are, JUSTICE!!!

[Kats inc]

Kats Inc, you and I have disagreed on many issues in the past, its nice to have an issue where you and I are singing, if not on the same hymn sheet, at least one that is pretty similar. I have enormous respect for you, believe it or not, because you do care about what you do. I only wish that there were more like you and fewer like the ones who are frustrating your efforts. I sincerely hope that you are never caught up in an incident like Baby P, you certainly don’t deserve to.

 

Thank you Sorry I've been away on holiday so haven't acknowledged this before.We fight the same battle even if from a slightly different angle sometimes

[fee4]

well I am that particular breed of scum known as the NHS manager.

 

i currently manage the entire "complex needs" service for my london borough (mental health)

this includes:

1 home for life residential home

1 assertive outeach team

2 long term/recovery teams

1 adult fostering sevice

1 supported housing service

1 hostel

1 aspergers service

1 in patient assessment service

1 early intervention in psychosis team (young people)

1 supported lodgings service

 

i wont bore you with the staff/patient numbers involved-but both are substantial

im responsible for staff/patients/carers/budget/environment/data quality/mental health act/infection control/training/supervision/food/quality of care/links to primary care/mental capacity issues etc etc.

 

i will put money on the fact that i have failed in several of these areas-right now-today.

maybe i havent checked that everyone has done the child risk training-maybe a leave form is incomplete-perhaps i have employed a member of staff whose not up to it.

I appreciate that managers are all considered to be over paid F wits who dont give a toss about the patients/staff or service-

I too go to work in the morning and do my best for all in my Borough-sometimes its not going to be good enough....but im not the enemy-i am however always a convienent target

 

Fee

[Kats inc]

Fee I have no doubt at all that you are one of the managers who actually cares about their team and the service provided and is 100% committed to both the NHS and it's users.

 

Sadly my manager doesn't really give a fig about anyone but herself and this comes across in her daily work.If I had a manager like you I think I would feel very differently about my job.

 

I think we all make excellent targets at times like this for the media to blast at.They don't care who they ruin as long as it looks good in print for the masses.To be honest I think more people are interested in the 'car crash' mentality of a child abuse case than the actual child dying aspect (I'm not implying that's anyone on this board btw,just the public in general).

 

It's hard for people to understand the stresses of working in the NHS these days especially as a senior nurse.Budgets vs staff support vs paperwork vs targets vs services vs etc etc etc make it nigh on impossible.

 

I think most of us live in fear of our heads being next on the chopping block

 

But for what it's worth I think you would make a fab manager to have.