Abstract
2008 was my inaugural year as a child protection social worker in central London. It coincided with widespread public debate on and disgust at the murder of 17-month-old Peter Connolly in the London Borough of Haringey. The political and public discourse circulating around my profession at that time affected my confidence in my own practice and, certainly, impacted on how I thought about service user perceptions of social work. As such, this critical public incident became a pivotal and emotive personal event. Warner, evidently also affected by the uproar in the wake of ‘Baby P’, began this publication at that time to explore the symbiotic interaction between the media and political spheres, and ‘the impossible space’ between the public sphere of the state and private lives of families that social work occupies.
Warner traces the political backdrop to the response to ‘Baby P’ and the effect of harrowing media accounts of the case and self-representations of the main politicians through analysis of speeches and discourse throughout Chapters Two and Three. While social workers were portrayed as deprived of common sense or even a desire to save the vulnerable children of the ‘underclass’, the ‘underclass’ themselves were depicted in terms of moral disturbance, disgust and filth (see also Garrett, 2009).
Chapter Four explores the trajectory from crises to policy in child care services by way of emotive political work. A particularly clear-cut example of Warner’s ‘emotional politics’ is the interventions of Michael Gove, who shaped child care policy on the basis of his own positive experience of adoption; he was to rush through a 26-week care proceedings procedure with dubitable effectiveness. Hence, the personal was rendered highly political, with apparent success for that particular politician. In Chapter Five, Warner discusses the ways in which class, gender and ‘race’ are used to demarcate those who should and should not have social work services, and who are and are not ‘good parents’. Chapter Six explores the changing role of serious case reviews and how their remit is to apportion blame and change policy on a national level, rather than, as was the original idea, to focus on local issues and learning needs. Chapter Seven provides international examples of how other nations have responded to crises in child protection and learning points arising.
Warner suggests an approach, a ‘new emotional politics’, utilising the position of the Chief Social Worker and the College of Social Work as a way to access the attention of policy makers and politicians. That the College has, since publication, been disbanded by the government speaks volumes about the disregard felt by central government for the profession having a united voice. Members of Parliament, working with local constituencies, should be engaged to bring the voice of the community to central policy makers. Warner’s primary manifesto recalls the oft-mentioned issue for social work: that the frontline and families are ever more separate from the decision makers and purse strings. Rather than ‘parachuting’ into homes in a crisis, social work is most effective when it is sited in communities and responsive in transparent and culturally appropriate ways. However, in London boroughs at least, there is an increase in centralisation with social workforces being situated in shiny blocks with no service user access.
This is not a politically neutral publication: dominant politicians are unswervingly critiqued and their motivations laid bare. For the reader, it is an enlightening study of the wider forces at play while we work in our discrete and ever more separate teams in higher and higher offices. However, the value in this book, for me, is in its reminder that top-down risk-averse agendas that tell social workers to act ‘authoritatively’ fly in the face of the founding principles of social work – to be angry at poverty, not at people living in poverty. Rather than leaving the reader in despair, the proactive approach suggested – of accessing the policy makers and communities (I am especially attracted to the idea of positively using MPs rather than reacting to their bidding) – leaves us feeling more upbeat and empowered than the events of 2008.