Comments on: The death of Chloe Valentine: the future of professional social work in child protection

By: vittorio1

vittorio1 — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 02:26:01 +0000

The inflexibility of the AASW membership criteria mean it has lost a very valuable member

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 20:33:12 +0000

I hold a masters in social work; a masters in law; a graduate diploma in family dispute resolution; and diploma in counseling – and yet I can’t be a member of the AASW. I’ve facilitated in excess of 4000 family law mediations; written many hundreds of child protection social assessment reports and family reports that are accepted in courts across the country; I’m a 12 year member of a group of social scientists who meet every month for peer supervision and ongoing professional development- and yet I can’t be a member of the AASW. My masters in social work focussed on child abuse, child protection, children in society and advanced social work research (because it was always my intention to focus on the ‘forensic’ side of social work involved in Report writing) – and yet, I can’t be a member of the AASW. I have over 40 years experience working with families in child protection and family law matters, in my capacity as a lawyer – and yet, with all of this experience, history and qualifications, I, seemingly, cannot be a member of the AASW. I would join tomorrow and, I believe, be a valuable and contributing member, if I could. The AASW should have a category of membership for forensic social workers, such as myself. There are many of us who do not work in a therapeutic role, but, nevertheless provide valuable service to the wider community, in the forensic role that we undertake in court matters. And yet, a first year graduate with a bachelors degree can be a member. Frankly, it’s frustrating

By: Gorgosity Kate

Gorgosity Kate — Sat, 29 Aug 2015 23:04:49 +0000

The issue here is the bottom line and State governments willingness to spend the money that is needed to protect the most vulnerable children in our society. There needs to be a shift in the culture of child protection services leaving the removal of children as the absolute last resort.

Governments fund child protection services inadequately. Workers are generally new or inexperienced and they last in the job for five minutes so as people become more skilled and find they cannot cope in the job they take the skills away with them to another workplace. Skilled social workers avoid this area of work because of the difficulty in actually protecting children due to systemic structures, poor working conditions, too high caseloads which sets them up for failure, terrible pay and the dangerous nature of the work dealing with depraved parents who see no problem in treating their children so badly.

Workers need protected and small case loads, no more than 5 active cases at a time. The government should be able to fund child protection workers on a needs basis.

The culture of using discretion and keeping the child with the family at all costs
needs to change. Parents who are abusing the children need to be made accountable for their neglect and abuse. Systems are weighted too much in the favour of parents.

Only experience social workers should be employed in the child protection system.

Child protection workers need intensive supervision and I agree peer review you should be compulsory.

I believe that child protection workers need to work more closely with the police if we are to really protect the children.

By: vittorio1

vittorio1 — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 00:15:54 +0000

Thanks Frank
Again- we don’t really know what happened in this case, but your broad comments are borne out by past histories. What you call common sense I call good professional practice… and that can be legislated. You yourself go on to outline some of the elements of how it could be done. Which of course begs the question of why Families SA and other similar statutory authorities do not use the powers they already have in abundance to legislate common sense.
Anyone familiar with the history of hand washing in hospital infection control will know how many years it took for it to become “legislated”, and how many needless deaths could have been avoided. Ditto our professional practice standards, which hopefully one day will truly be considered common sense.

By: Frankie Panaia

Frankie Panaia — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 22:18:13 +0000

Mandatory AASW registration would not have saved this child, and the many other children who have perished in similar tragic, but very preventable circumstances. For the simple reason – you cannot enforce and legislate plain common sense.

Over the years I have reviewed these ‘cases’ identifying a persistent theme common to most. As follows:

(a) the child was already flagged by local child protective services
(b) maltreatment of the child increased in intensity and depravity
(c) the parent, usually the mother, was sighted / supported to the exclusion of the child.

Above is the typical ‘recipe’ of incompetence and sheer negligence by CP workers when managing cases of suspected physical child abuse. All too often, the benefit of doubt is given to the mother, while the victim child, bruised and starved is concealed in the bathroom or some other such space of concealment.

In all cases of suspected physical abuse the child should ALWAYS be sighted / interviewed separate from the parent. This cannot be underscored enough. The child should be relocated to a safe space during the interview to ascertain whether abuse has occurred.

All cases of child physical abuse should be peer reviewed, that is, no one individual should be invested with the massive responsibility of determining whether a child will be or will not be murdered by their ‘caregivers’.

When serious physical abuse is established, the parent should be prosecuted, while the child should be immediately removed. There should be no exceptions – assault is a crime in or outside the family unit’.

The above is not ‘rocket science’ neither is it time and resource consuming. However this prescription for intervention is useless if the massive handicap of CP discretion, particularly by graduate social workers is allowed to persist in cases of suspected physical child abuse.

By: vittorio1

vittorio1 — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 12:54:59 +0000

Thanks for your thoughtful comments David
Of course I agree with you that social workers must always act in the best interests of vulnerable children, including using whatever legislative powers are available, as long as those powers are within scope of our professional ethics. By way of example the AASW has published a very useful policy paper on income management -which for me highlights the dangers of the indiscriminate use of such a tool.
We must however reserve judgment in this particular case because we know so few of the facts.
History will be final judge of whether social workers ever achieve registration. Readers of my blog will know that I am not holding my breath waiting for that, and that I am also skeptical of the potential benefits of registration by government. We must press ahead with AASW self managed registration- no matter what.
But putting that aside, it is worth remembering that government departments have enormous powers to both set and enforce professional standards. In fact many government departments that employ social workers quite sensibly use the AASW code of ethics as their professional standard. It has always been completely within the power of Families South Australia to insist on the highest quality supervision, CPD, tight governance of scope of practice, annual performance appraisal against our code of ethics, and the rigorous investigation and appropriate sanction and remediation of any breach of practice standards.
And so I frankly don’t see how registration would add value to the powers that Families SA already has? (The coronial findings strongly suggest that it simply failed to use those powers.)
It is really heartening to see some increase in AASW membership- but this increase is not happening in the government sector- hence my plea to ramp up our efforts in that area in combination with the relevant trade unions.

By: David Gould

David Gould — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 04:24:35 +0000

If we had 100% of social workers as AASW members, we would have the mechanism for self-managed registration. It ought to be compulsory to be a member of the Association from day one of student life. That we now have 9000 members is a tribute to the work of the National Board and branches in recruiting. The intake of student members is noteworthy. While registration is by no means assured yet, it is necessary to protect vulnerable clients. Membership needs to be tied to mandatory levels of ongoing learning and professional development.

In regard to the South Australian case, even dysfunctional, mentally ill and drug addicted people have choices that they can make, and can be assisted to make, with skilful intervention. In some instances, compulsion, coercion and drug screening, income management and the like can assist in breaking a self-destructive cycle of failure and be a catalyst for positive choices to be made. The problems are complex and massive, but the failure of child protection workers to use the powers that they have and fail to save the life of a vulnerable and defenceless child is appalling.