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Scenes like this are not far from Rochdale Council’s new £50 million offices. But when I spoke to child-protection bosses in the wake of Rochdale’s grooming scandal a few years ago, where young girls had been continually raped by gangs of men, I may as well have been in a foreign country. Despite talking about a reality that existed a few minutes’ drive from their offices, there was no awareness of what life was like for these kids. No connection, no empathy. The head of the Rochdale Safeguarding Children Board told me they needed to take “a deeper dive into the theory” to understand the problem. The director of children’s services implied to me that young girls who were being raped were “making lifestyle choices”. She later admitted to an incredulous home affairs select committee that she’d never met any of the victims.
The impression I got was that they viewed these girls as an astronomer would look through a telescope at planets. Their lives were so far from the girls’ experiences that to them, they might as well have been a remote dot.
The Rochdale grooming scandal would have never come to light had it not been for the fantastic health care workers who helped these young girls. They listened, they understood and they cared. They were steeped in working-class community values, not remote theory. One of them in particular tried desperately hard to get the police and social services to listen to the girls and take action, but to no avail.
The problem then, as now in Rotherham, was a middle-class management in children’s services that simply didn’t want to know and didn’t care. The author of the Rotherham report, Prof Alexis Jay, said last week that a group of senior managers held a view that couldn’t be challenged. This despotic approach is ruining social work and failing families. Where once there was a fair representation of working-class social workers who could listen and relate to all manner of challenging families, the profession is now stuffed with textbook professionals bereft of emotional intelligence and incapable of relating to troubled kids. And for the good ones still left, they’re all too often forced to adopt foolish practices that fly in the face of common sense. Full story...
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Scenes like this are not far from Rochdale Council’s new £50 million offices. But when I spoke to child-protection bosses in the wake of Rochdale’s grooming scandal a few years ago, where young girls had been continually raped by gangs of men, I may as well have been in a foreign country. Despite talking about a reality that existed a few minutes’ drive from their offices, there was no awareness of what life was like for these kids. No connection, no empathy. The head of the Rochdale Safeguarding Children Board told me they needed to take “a deeper dive into the theory” to understand the problem. The director of children’s services implied to me that young girls who were being raped were “making lifestyle choices”. She later admitted to an incredulous home affairs select committee that she’d never met any of the victims.
The impression I got was that they viewed these girls as an astronomer would look through a telescope at planets. Their lives were so far from the girls’ experiences that to them, they might as well have been a remote dot.
The Rochdale grooming scandal would have never come to light had it not been for the fantastic health care workers who helped these young girls. They listened, they understood and they cared. They were steeped in working-class community values, not remote theory. One of them in particular tried desperately hard to get the police and social services to listen to the girls and take action, but to no avail.
The problem then, as now in Rotherham, was a middle-class management in children’s services that simply didn’t want to know and didn’t care. The author of the Rotherham report, Prof Alexis Jay, said last week that a group of senior managers held a view that couldn’t be challenged. This despotic approach is ruining social work and failing families. Where once there was a fair representation of working-class social workers who could listen and relate to all manner of challenging families, the profession is now stuffed with textbook professionals bereft of emotional intelligence and incapable of relating to troubled kids. And for the good ones still left, they’re all too often forced to adopt foolish practices that fly in the face of common sense. Full story...
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