Dear Social Work News,
A child has died and social workers were involved, you know that as you have now published four articles on it, i’ll list them:
Finley Boden was placed on a child protection plan while his mother was still pregnant with him. He was removed from their care at the hospital after birth. The parents wanted him in their care. This all went back to court.
It seems as if all parties were in agreement that Finley should be placed with his parents. The social worker wanted a six month transition, the court stated the transition should be eight weeks.
Finley died 39 days after he was returned to their care on Christmas day 2020, he was ten months old.
He was beaten, burnt, and broken by his parents.
Social Workers were still involved, i’m going to guess he would have still been on a child protection plan so visits could have been as frequent as the local authority wanted them to be.
The last time a social worker saw Finley was on November 27th, and that was while he was asleep on a sofa and it was through a window as his parents did not open the door.
On December 23rd a social worker had the door slammed in her face after being told that Finlay was asleep. He died two days later.
Vince Peart felt it was worth two opinion pieces, given they are his opinion they are both very biased, the first starts with him stroking his own ego and then name dropping.
Well, Mr well-known social worker tasked with defending the honour of your profession, you are failing badly and making your profession look bad in the process. While also making out that the general public are all social worker haters and we spend all our time calling social workers murderers.
As a woman I did notice that despite 83% of social workers in England being women, that it’s a man who has decided to self style himself as the defender of the social workers.
In his first article he basically just tells us all to not blame anyone but work together to make the world a better place while making clear that the courts went against what the social worker said about the transition time, so pointing the finger there.
This is from his second opinion piece
I am shocked that the well known social worker Vince Peart, who works as a content editor for Social Work News and writes a lot of articles, cannot understand what kind of comments the following headline is going to get. “Why did they walk away? Social workers visited baby Finley Boden’s mess-strewn home two days before parents beat him to death but didn’t insist on seeing him -even when they spotted his mother buying drugs”.
It’s going to get reactive comments, it’s going to get people slamming social workers, as the article itself blames social workers. Why not write an article slamming the Daily Mail, whose article i’ve referenced above? They are the ones with the social worker blaming headline and story. Instead he blames members of the public and “the brazen lies that many people with an axe to grind against social workers like to spread online” He even suggests we check the comments of news articles, so I did, mostly people saying the same as the article said.
Vince Peart is a well-known social worker who works for Social Work News and has control of the content of Social Work News. He could easily write an article, or a series of articles, ripping in to the news outlets that write headlines like that. Instead he targeted the public, because we are stupid, obviously. Special mention to those with lived experience who i’m guessing are the people telling brazen lies against social workers online. More specifically, those with lived experience of having a child removed from their care, who are often the most vulnerable of those with lived experience. Especially as those who have their children removed are all too often those who themselves were removed from their parents.
Why doesn’t Vince go after those putting out the headlines like i’ve detailed above? Is he worried that Sky News might lose his number if he does?
Why make the death of Finley all about you and your profession and how misunderstood you all are? A baby is dead, he would be 3 years old now, starting pre school, that was cruelly stolen from him by the two people who should have protected him the most. It’s an abhorrent crime, the worst, i’ve already set myself up for disappointment as i’d like to see two whole life sentences handed down when they are sentenced, and it’s unlikely that will happen.
I’ve seen what the public are saying should happen to the perpetrators, if you’ve had a child, or I guess even seen one, the thought of doing what they did hits every single anger button in your body.
What isn’t needed are articles from a social worker going on the defensive, and offensive, against the general public and those with lived experience of social work.
All the professionals wanted to keep him safe, all professionals agreed that he should be returned to his parents, the only difference was in the length of transition.
Why be over dramatic about how much hate social workers will get and how terrible it is for social workers when a child is murdered by a parent, it solves nothing and widens the chasm between social workers and those with lived experience.
What service users hate the most about social workers are those who twist things to fit a certain narrative, and those who form a conclusion without knowing all of the facts. Both of those things Vince Peart has done in his posts. He’s blamed the court because the judge said 8 weeks and not 6 months, and the overall posts give the impression that the court is to blame.
The only facts we have are that Finley was murdered by his parents. Everything else will be subject to a Child Safeguarding Practice Review. Only when that is published will the public, and that does include Social Work News, know what happened with regards to all professionals and organisations who were involved.
I feel it is highly unprofessional for Social Work News and Vince Peart to give opinions on what happened with regards to organisations involved with Finley until after the Safeguarding Practice Review is published.
We only know a few things, we know a social worker attempted a visit on the 23rd December, we know the social worker was refused access.
Social Work News are seeking to blame the judge who decided on an 8 week transition instead of the 6 month transition the social worker wanted. We don’t know if that would have made any difference. We don’t know exactly what went on in the time leading up to his death. Were there meetings? How did they manage to hide away from the social workers for long enough to harm him and then eventually kill him?
How did the transistion go? was it textbook? Did the social workers feel it was working well? Did they feel he was safe with his parents? Did anyone say they were concerned he may be being hurt?
Lot’s of questions, no answers, the only way we will get the answers is after the Safeguarding Practice Review is done and published.
This article has taken me a while to write as I caught covid and have been too poorly to write. In the meantime, social work news have made a social work radio podcast regarding Finley Boden, which I haven’t listened to it, and Vince Peart has also put out the following article:
Nobody could ever accuse Vince Peart of being humble.
That extremely egotistical and self indulgent article is another reason why service users get upset.
Those social workers who believe they are superheroes and thus every single thing they do or say is right, without actually listening to the children they are meant to be helping. I don’t recognise any social workers i’ve ever met with the description above. I’ve met those who are passionate about helping children and actually listen to them, but all this self sacrifice and acting like you are superheroes is far too much.
You are doing a job, you are not celebrities and your public profile isn’t going to stop you doing your job. Stop using children’s murders to whine about how you don’t feel adored enough.
Children are being failed daily, older children get removed from their parents and placed into care. The care system is so damaging, and the child’s experiences are so damaging, and the child doesn’t get enough help, that a few years later you are back to take the child of that child into care. There are far too many care experienced mothers having their children taken into care. That is failing that child in the worst way. That is not heroic at all.
Social workers with huge ego’s are not good social workers, I know this from bitter experience, they are more interested about getting praised for saving poor ickle children than they are about actually listening and helping.
I know there is a huge lack of funds in social care, I know there is a shortage of staff, and given by everything i’ve read in SWN, a lot of social workers are just giving up. The past 13 years has decimated social work. Even without that having happened, you are not heroes.
Shouldn’t social workers already have a genuine desire to do good?
Why so obsessed with how the public view social workers? I cannot understand how that actually affects social workers at all. Their jobs are not affected by whether the public like them or not. I don’t even think it’s true that the public hates social workers, most people don’t have an opinion or even ever think of anything social work related because they have never had any need for social workers.
Then you have those who have been helped by social work who will have positive things to say.
Then those who have had children removed who of course will be highly upset and angry and say bad things, it is only natural for them to have negative feelings towards social workers. When a child dies and they were under a CP plan, of course the public are going to ask how did it happen and will be aiming those questions at the organisations involved. When multiple family members have raised concerns with social care, multiple times, over a period of time, and nothing is done and the child dies, the reaction is going to be negative.
You can’t start advertising saving lives and giving out stories, just a little thing called confidentiality. How is this meant to be achieved? Newspapers and TV to start putting out articles and programmes making social workers look positive? That is utterly ridiculous. They can’t do something like a 6 week series where they follow child protection social workers around and film them doing their job, that could never happen. Then you have the family court, which nobody can talk about, let alone a newspaper of a TV channel putting out an article involving a child getting taken into care and saving their life.
Given that SWN has endless posts regarding how horrible it is being a social worker, how social workers hate being social workers, how they hate the lack of money, hate the paperwork, hate that they have too many cases, and in some cases, hate the people, how do they expect the public to have a positive view of the profession if all they are churning out is social workers hating social work?
It is crystal clear now that Finley should never have been with his parents. It is imperative that this is investigated thoroughly and any learning is shared.
It saddens me that social workers demonise service users. The articles written by Vince encouraged other social workers to demonise us in the comments on social media, which was not great to read.
SWN posted an article about a social worker who has had his suspension extended by SWE. The social worker turned up drunk to visit a child, he’d also driven to the appointment, so had also put road users at great risks.
https://www.mysocialworknews.com/article/social-worker-suspended-for-being-drunk-during-home-visit
Some of the comments on said article:
Whilst I do not condone drinking at work, I cannot condemn this worker without a lot more detail. We all know how stressful a job Social Work is
I’m not saying I condone it, but I totally get it….
Let’s not all pretend we don’t think about loading up before we go into some visits but yes thinking it and actually doing it are two different things
I’m not sayin it’s right i’m just sayin I understand
Lot’s of laughing emoji’s throughout the comments.
Given that the child who he was visiting stated:
The social worker was stumbling, smelled of alcohol, and appeared unstable while talking.
The social worker was also arrested for drink driving on the same day.
Those are terrible actions by a social worker, a social worker visited and spoke to a child while they were so drunk they could barely stand. We have no idea why social workers were involved, it’s even possible that the reason for social care involvement involved alcohol. Just the child smelling alcohol could have been traumatic for the child.
All the social workers commenting on the article were doing is laughing about it, giving the social worker all the sympathy and excusing their drinking and breaking the law by drink driving by saying it’s the fault of the job. He made a conscious decision to get drunk and then get in his car and go visit a vulnerable child. It’s not funny and he doesn’t deserve sympathy for his actions.
Funnily enough, after writing that I went and looked at the case on the Social Work England website. He got the 9 month suspension extension because he has no insight into how terrible his actions were. Everything he says is all about himself and has no insight into how his behaviour could have affected others. His drink driving could have killed someone. At least his actions made a whole bunch of social workers laugh.
After spending the past week reading the articles and the comments left by other social workers, I feel that social work is in an even worse place than I thought.
They think that they should be worshipped, and in turn they belittle us. No wonder things go wrong so often when a drunk driving social worker who visited a child and then got arrested by the police gets sympathy, and other social workers saying they understand why he’d drink on the job.
Calling those with lived experience brazen liars with an axe to grind is absolutely sickening, it’s abhorrent for Vince Peart to have said it and it’s abhorrent for Social Work News to have published it.