My lovely old dad, bless him, just turned 94. So he reads the Daily Mail, loves Brexit, adores Trump and hates Theresa May, like he hated David Cameron, for ‘not being Tory enough’. Those are your political views if you’re lucky enough to still have any at 94. And he hates Social Workers. Even though a lot of what they do is very difficult, very important and often life-saving.

The problem is that Social Services act within a very constrained set of laws and regulations. So they are sometimes simply not allowed to take ‘Baby F’ (or the letter of choice) from abusive parents/step-parents/drug-dealers because certain criteria are not reached. And when Baby F is murdered by aforementioned scumbags, Social Services take the flak. Similarly, when they do take a child into care, away from its parents, for protection, they take flak for that too, for breaking up families.

So pretty much everyone hates social workers, to some degree, not just nonagenarians. You’re not human if you don’t. Even if you do appreciate what they do, up to a point.

But that point is often missed, or simply lost in the rules they have to follow.

Like contacting a convicted, jailed rapist, currently serving a 35 year sentence, to ask whether he’d like to meet his child and take any parental responsibilities. The child was the product of one of his rapes. The man was part of one of the notorious ‘grooming gangs’ who raped and abused 1500 girls in Rotherham, many of whom were in ‘Social Services care’ at the time.

The mother wasn’t asked whether she thought this might be a good idea. A nice thing. The child (now a teen) has no interest in meeting his ‘father’. But Social Services were just following rules, laws and protocols. Which I’m going to assume come from Brussels and the fabulous Human Rights department of near-insanity. Because I hate to think that good, wholesome, roast-beef-and-Yorkshire-pudding British law could ever be so fucking stupid.

“Darling, would you like to meet your father? That nice man who drugged and raped me when I was a vulnerable and unstable 15 year-old? And 864 others too?”

The (now) woman in question has rather bravely come out publicly about this because otherwise the Council in question can’t be named.

So even those sympathetic to the importance of Social Services have a lot of questions to ask Rotherham Council about the most terribly mishandled abuse scandal and the cock-ups they’re still making relating to it. They are the ‘gift that keeps giving’.

Does this mean I’m getting old?

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx