Lord Laming's review of children's services in England, announced on 12^th March, concluded that child protection issues in England had not had ‘the priority they deserved’ and that many of the reforms brought in after Victoria Climbie's death in 2000 had not been properly implemented. Laming referred to Social Work as a ‘Cinderella service’.

I think this is an intriguing metaphor, and worth exploring further. In the Cinderella folk story the heroine has attributes that are unrecognised and lie hidden, and after a period of brutality from those who are supposed to be caring for her, she unexpectedly achieves success and emerges from obscurity. Why might elements of this plot be so meaningful in relation to contemporary feelings about social workers?

I don’t think it was explicit, nor consciously in the mind of Lord Laming, but anyone who knows Cinderella will remember that this girl was the daughter of a man who remarried the ‘wicked stepmother’ who already had her own two daughters – the ‘ugly sisters’ of pantomime fun.

In modern parlance, she was abused daily and deemed to be no better than the cinders she was forced to sit in.

So this story has resonance in relation to the recent child abuse cases that we have become so familiar with in the media. I wonder if Laming had in mind more than just the idea that Cinderella is a good metaphor for how social workers are treated (under resourced and under-recognised). Did his choice of metaphor also imply that every day social workers must confront difficult and quite often very dangerous people, people who, like Cinderella’s stepmother, abuse and threaten children but who are experts in covering this up?

Cinderella rises above her ghastly situation, to marry the prince and live happily ever after. But there is no fairytale intervention for social workers, who must routinely deal with people whose minds, actions and ways of relating to others seem incomprehensible. Likewise and more importantly, there is no easy, failsafe way of preventing the most extreme forms of child abuse. To understand why, we have to understand something about the complex nature of the work that social workers routinely do.

when deeds are ‘evil’ it relieves us from the burden of further explanation

The notion of ‘evil’, which trips off the tabloid tongue so easily – and which was applied so readily to the child killers of Jamie Bulger – brings us to a halt in our understanding of what social workers have to face. This is because when deeds are conceptualised as ‘evil’ it relieves us from the burden of further explanation, even to our mostly secular contemporary minds. Evil is a coded way of stating the incomprehensibility of something. Even if governments seek to understand the causes of crime, to use Tony Blair’s famous phrase, large parts of popular opinion do not want to.

Among Lord Lamings’ findings was that ‘there had been an ‘over-emphasis on process and targets’, resulting in a ‘loss of confidence’ among social workers, who were overstretched and undertrained’ and that ‘progress was being “hampered” by an ‘over-complicated... tick-box assessment and recording system’. Many social workers concur, arguing that the emphasis on data-entry and record keeping has meant that less and less time is actually spent building relationships with family members that in itself is the key to detecting child abuse:

In his earlier report into the death of Victoria Climbié, Laming noted that parents were hostile and workers were frightened to visit their homes; and that ‘apparent or disguised cooperation from parents often prevented or delayed understanding of the severity of harm to the child, and cases drifted’. The latter was also a factor in the Baby P case, where the mother was adept at simulating compliance with social workers. Because of a lack of critical supervision that would have forced hard questioning of evidence, the social worker was allowed to assume that the mother was committed to improving her son’s care even though injuries occurred whilst he was with her.

Research shows that most people who abuse children over long periods are dedicated to disguising what is happening. It’s also clear that social workers along with doctors and police find it exceedingly difficult to confidently identify child abuse and torture. Their work is fundamentally interpretative, under conditions of extreme pressure and anxiety. In confronting a suspected child abuser a fierce, aggressive denial is normally the response. Are they rightly or wrongly accused? Whose version of reality is correct? Upon what basis do you make a judgement, which has serious consequences, especially when breaking up a family is now considered to be the last resort?

We are very familiar with popular narratives in film and television where we as the audience are held in suspense, not knowing for some time if the hero is actually a villain. As his actions slowly become more risky or mores suspicious to others we start to see, through their eyes, that s/he is not as first appeared. But we expect social workers to straightforwardly ‘know’ when child abuse is happening and being covered up and when it isn’t.

At the same time, social workers who act to remove a child from its parents because of suspected or known abuse are all too frequently accused of representing the overbearing power of the state, interfering in the private sphere of sacred family life. Social workers are vilified when children are removed from their parents because it is unthinkable that parents could intentionally harm their children and when this happens, social workers represent the flaunting of the unthinkable under our noses.

It seems therefore that social workers can’t ever win. Unlike others of their colleagues who care for children colleagues in the public sector such as doctors, nurses, police and teachers, who may at times achieve heroic status, social workers are the object of perpetual social anxiety and aggression. So perhaps there are obvious reasons why they will never be loved by the public. If we barely understand the nature of their work and would rather not understand it (we certainly seem unable to realise that they do succeed in keeping most children safe, day after day) that is because on behalf of us all they must not only directly encounter extremely distressing and terrorising human behaviour but also make life and death decisions in these circumstances.

If we who are not social workers find it hard to ‘think the unthinkable’, that mothers and fathers can intentionally harm their children, then we should remember that social workers in the field of child protection are confronted with having to think this every day. Inevitably, if they are under extreme pressure due to unfilled posts, lack of supervision and overloaded cases, their capacity to do this thinking is undermined. If they are not enabled to do the work of social work properly and with an emphasis on quality – with good, critical and experienced supervisors, time to develop relationships with children and families seen separately as well as together – social workers and the children they protect will never emerge from a Cinderella status.

Further reading

An interesting article by Eileen Munro of the London School of Economics argues that the reforms made in the wake of Laming’s report on Victoria Climbié’s death have weakened the quality of social work.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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In the last month or so I’ve become intrigued by the spectacle of the Republican ‘pick’ of Sarah Palin for the vice presidential candidate. I say spectacle because Palin is everywhere in US news bulletins and in the ‘blogosphere’, alternately spoofed, lampooned and applauded as ‘everymom’, and even turned into an action doll range wearing a school girl uniform with a red bra and a gun holster.

Once upon a time, two white male candidates would have been apparently able, quite unproblematically, to ‘represent’ all Americans including women and non-whites. I’m not saying that the absence up to now of non-white and non-male candidates for high political office was a ‘good thing’. I’m saying that the campaigns for non-white and non-male candidates in these US election campaigns have strongly veered towards a position where the capacity of candidates to represent something beyond their own interests or personal identity is now radically in doubt.

If you think back to Margaret Thatcher, there was little sense in which anyone expected her to ‘represent feminism’, just because she was female, and rightly so in fact, although it was a bitter pill for many to swallow. She was first of all a Conservative. She was also tellingly represented as a female masquerading as a male, but that kind of sexism notwithstanding, one lesson many (including feminists) learned from the Thatcher episode was that anatomy is not destiny. Thatcher showed many woment that you cannot assume that one’s best interests are represented by someone ‘like you’.

Thatcher showed you cannot assume that one’s best interests are represented by someone ‘like you’.

So, to return to the US elections: one black candidate (Obama) and one female candidate (Clinton), followed by one female VP nomination on the Republican side, has blown the universalism of the old days out of the water. Obama’s burden of representation is: can he, as an educated black man, represent all peoples, not just non-whites, not just the middle classes? Clinton’s was: could she overcome the difficulty powerful women have in the public domain, of being likeable as well as being authoritative? Could she attract more than just the feminist vote?

In the midst of these struggles over the Democratic nomination, a textbook semiotic situation , John McCain was looking old, white and male, just because there were these other candidates who could be contrasted to him. McCain invoked himself as ‘the American president Americans have been waiting for’ (as opposed to Obama, he meant, whose Americanness was implicitly in question). But his problem as Republicans perceived it, was that against Obama and Clinton he appeared to be more like Bush, whereas he needed to put clear water between his own brand of Republican politics and the track record of the Bush administration.

Sarah Palin.
[image by Sskennel, some rights reserved]

Once Obama failed to choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate, the door was open to McCain to look like the progressive and agent of change by choosing a woman. So then the Republican party, picks Sarah Palin, a politically inexperienced self-styled ‘hockey mum’ from small town Alaska. She is often thus described, but this description is not my sexist inflection, it is exactly how she represents herself, and it is why the Republicans selected her. Palin was selected entirely for her gender and her entire pitch has been about folksy political illiteracy. Had she been a man, she would not have been picked for VP.

As I’ve pointed out, this American election is to a very great extent fought on the turf of identity politics, brought about by a mostly ‘happy’ collusion between political parties who seek to use identity politics and media institutions that for the most part are bent on the personalisation of politics.

Identity-exploiting candidates such as Palin use whatever connection to a community they have to appeal to voters' sense of cultural familiarity, which serves to obscure the candidates' competence or fitness for office.

Republican political machinery have been active in pushing Palin’s identity profile, with conservative radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham enthusing that ‘A lot of women are calling in excited…The women of America will see that she might be the first woman vice president.’ Palin’s identity-based advantages go beyond gender, in Ingraham’s view: ‘Palin has an Eskimo husband, a Down’s Syndrome son, an Iraq-bound son.’ Of course she has traditional Republican political strengths: anti-abortion, anti-gun control, creationism, pro-oil drilling in Alaska, aggressive foreign policy inclinations and so on. But these are the default positions of  many a Republican candidate. But, only a woman could have been billed a ‘gun-toting, moose-hunting mother of five’ and have used a campaign image showing her sitting in the bloodstained snow, gun in hand, alongside the carcass of a large animal killed by her own fair hand. A mix of femininity and killer aggressiveness – an image of political woman based on the compromises necessary for women in Republican politics, combining a frontierswoman self-reliance with the sexual allure of a beauty contest winner.

Republican strategists...hope that Palin will attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters

Republican strategists have been open in the hope that Palin will attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters, who believe that they had a right to a woman in the White House. It’s an extraordinary thought, that Palin was picked because it was considered that her anatomy could buy her Clinton’s votes, despite the fact she wears Republican clothes. Shades of  the Thatcher experience then, to any deluded voters thinking that she is a feminist ticket.

Indeed, feminist overtures and apple pie ‘mom’ was the balancing trick that Palin offered in her first rally in Ohio as VP nominee. She began by drawing on a hackneyed feminist metaphor, and directly echoing a speech of Clinton’s: ‘It turns out that the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.’ In fashioning Palin’s affirmative action candidacy, the McCain campaign has gleefully adopted liberal feminist tactics and grievances that conservative Republicans have so long derided. No matter that Palin chastised Clinton for whining when she complained of sexism during the primary, or that McCain laughed approvingly when one of his supporters called Clinton a ‘bitch’.

However, lest she came over as an aggressive feminist (and given that conservatives traditionally scoff at the idea that American society systematically blocks women from advancement), the main theme of her speeches have been her own personal story, spliced with sentimental guff such as ‘Our family has the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges and the same joys…I’m just one of many mums who will say an extra prayer each night for our sons and daughters going into harm’s way’.

Palin’s popularity reflects, in great part, a cultural mistrust of expertise and intellectual rigour. Her inexperience as a former mayor of a tiny town and governor of a small, idiosyncratic state for less than two years, her confident ignorance about the economy and international relations, her ditzy delivery and religious zeal, all add up to the sense of a special kind of feminine ignorance catapulted onto the world stage.

At the televised debate last week between the VPs, Palin played all flickering eyelashes and flirty folksiness, at one point actually winking at the camera. As one typical political commentator said, ‘She lit up the screen at times with her smile and occasional winks’. In recent days, though, we have had less ‘lipstick’ and more ‘pitbull’, as an increasingly desperate McCain-Palin ticket exploits the anger of Republican extremists about Obama, stirring up mob-like behaviour in the ranks. As the Republicans move into the territory of assassinating Obama on racial grounds (Palin said he is someone ‘who doesn't see America as we do’), they move further into frivolity. Ignorance doesn’t have to be a woman, and ignorance may not secure votes in the long run, but only a woman could build her political credibility on the appeal of ignorance.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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Everywhere these days the mantra of ‘choice’ rings in our ears. No politician can speak about education or health without choice being a key part of the message.

But, what is less often discussed is the question of who is choosing choice. It does seem that we are simply to take for granted that this idea, one that is driving change and reform across the public sector, will lead us to better public services. For in the name of this idea, we are promised enhanced ‘transparency’, openness and democracy. On the face of it, it’s difficult to see why anyone could question that all these things are simply good things.

However, I wonder just what capacities we need in order to exercise choice in the first place. Exercising ‘choice’ is not just a case of being able to access ‘raw’ facts, after all. Facts always have a surrounding context in which we understand their importance and their meaning. Choice means that we take some care in selecting, that we use judgement or skill to distinguish what is to be preferred, which leads to being able to discriminate. Those advocating choice often seem to assume that exercising choice is a straightforward and uncomplicated matter. But if many of us nowadays find choosing a can of beans, or a electricity company a time-consuming and often ultimately inconclusive activity, how much more burdensome and challenging is it to have to constantly choose between doctors and hospitals for this or that treatment?

Just as has already happened with school ‘league tables’, and after a year-long review of the health service in England by the surgeon-minister, Lord Darzi, an announcement came in early July that hospitals would be required to publish "quality accounts" alongside the financial balance sheet. They will reveal information ranging from the death rates of surgeons to the relative satisfaction of patients during and after a course of treatment. NHS hospitals will be eligible for bonuses worth billions of pounds if they can demonstrate top quality clinical performance, the government said. Whereas a ‘poorer’ performer would lose patients to rival establishments with better clinical outcomes.

Patient's notes on board.

Understandably, potential patients want to know in advance about poor survival rate in particular hospitals. Who would not want to go somewhere safe, and with ‘better outcomes’ than elsewhere? Who would choose to ignore that information, if it was available. But that’s the rub, because the language of choice assumes there is a simple and direct relationship between this desire to reduce risk (to avoid unsafe doctors and hospitals and ultimately to avoid harm or death) and the solution, of successfully identifying doctors and hospitals that are less risky. It seems to me that the language of choice relies on an appeal to primitive desires in the population (‘I want to know if I’m less likely to die if I go to X hospital). But the solution it proposes is highly cognitively complex. Context and presentation are key elements and citizen-consumers would need to be educated in the social science of statistical interpretation before being able to fully take part; are these capacities equally available to everyone?

For, for example, mortality is not the only guide to the standard of treatment. A hospital that picked ‘bread and butter’ cases, turning away difficult operations, would score well. Another unit might have a higher mortality rate, by dint of having hugely expert surgeons prepared to take on complicated cases. How is a patient with a serious condition to ‘choose’, for emotionally s/he’d be drawn towards the ‘low mortality’ unit, perhaps against his/her interests. How does one judge which is ‘better’?

Another development in this armoury of consumer choice is that of a new website, iwantgreatcare.org, which will let patients rate and review every medic who has treated them. This follows hot on the heels of sites for customers of hotels, restaurants, books, travel companies to name a few, to record, praise or deride their experiences. Internet democracy is one way in which customer ‘choice’ is manifesting itself. The doctor behind the site claims that letting the public give medics individual reviews and rate their performance will help to bring about higher standards of care and to ‘choose’ which doctor to go and see.

Lord Darzi said: ‘For the first time, patients' own assessments of the success of their treatment and the quality of their experiences will have a direct impact on the way hospitals are funded.’ This may end up with a ‘social Darwinist’ survival of the fittest, which deals in primitive and absolute divisions between the bad and the good: the ‘bad’ (hospitals) go to the wall, and the ‘good’ are rewarded. Presumably then, the poorer performers, already punished with less income, will still have to treat patients, who will get worse treatment. Similar things have happened in education: parents are told they may ‘choose’ a school; in reality what are deemed ‘good’ schools are oversubscribed (and indeed become 'good' schools because wealthier parents are able to move into expensive catchment areas) and so not all parents may in fact be able to ‘choose’ those good schools. I have visions of ‘popular’ doctors on the iwantgreatcare.org website being in so much demand that there are long waiting lists at certain hospitals and no demand at others. How is this practicable, on the scale of a national health system?

The ‘choice’ agenda is part of a wider Labour government move away from a ‘one size fits all’ idea of public services towards a personalised system based around the ‘user’. But how many people really want a government to put so much energy into pursuing an ideology that, even if sounds ideal, has so many unintended consequences and assumes so much about the capacities of citizens?

Find out more

• Managing the NHS
• NHS management politics
• Our NHS, our future

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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