News

I agree wholeheartedly with Wendy Pitcairn (Letters, 8 November), who argues that "form-filling undermines the capacity of social workers to think for themselves". This perception will be shared by many social workers and yet managers seem to find it difficult to accept. Through the "ticking boxes" culture taken to extremes, clients have been made to feel dehumanised by the service.

But I take issue with Neil Leighton (Letters, same issue) on the matter of race. Much has been done to improve this, but it stubbornly remains true that black people are over-represented as service users, particularly in areas such as psychiatry and child protection, which can be seen as containing a stronger "policing" element. The white middle class parents in the A&E department, whom he cites, may feel stressed but they are not likely to feel immediately that the professionals do not speak the same language or share the same assumptions (this can occur even when the professionals are black). Black parents are still more likely to feel oppressed, misunderstood and powerless - with good reason considering that black children have a higher risk of entering the care system.

Social work is still, despite all our professional and service aspirations, primarily about dealing with relative poverty, its repercussions and its causes. Black people are still more likely to be poor than white, essentially because of racism. A service giving disproportionate importance to uniform form-filling is at risk of losing sight of what it is trying to achieve - high standards of professionalism.

Racism still exists in the public services and wider society. It is rooted in the messy, disreputable, unappealing aspects of human nature, which need a more creative approach than just ticking ethnicity boxes on forms.

Supporting professionalism will also go a long way to answering the points of yet another letter in the same issue - headlined "Time to value staff"!

Diane Jones
Bristol

...and an issue in inquiry

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (Perspectives, 25 October), states her concern that the inquiry into the tragic death of Victoria Climbie has deliberately omitted race from its remit and is unwilling to tackle the possibility that it played a central role in the failure of state agencies to prevent the little girl's murder.

However, race - in relation to the health service, social workers and the police - was defined as one of the key issues for the investigation when Lord Laming, the inquiry chairperson, published his "list of issues".

Furthermore, during his opening statement, Neil Garnham QC urged the inquiry "not just to keep an open mind on the subject [of race] but to keep its antennae attuned to the possible significance of race". He then went on to outline the ways in which race may indeed have played a part in the case. Not only has the inquiry not omitted the question of race from its remit, but it is actively trying to seek it out wherever it is relevant.

Lara Williams
Press Officer, Victoria Climbie Inquiry

Excluding the causes

Barbara Roche's defence of the social exclusion unit ("Making progress", 1 November) actually exposes its weaknesses. She urges social workers to continue their efforts to reduce poverty and deprivation but she has nothing new to say about how this will be achieved. Social workers cannot be expected to come up with solutions until the underlying causes are addressed.

Roche's use of the term "social exclusion" disguises the extent of poverty and avoids any analysis of the class divisions in society that give rise to, and perpetuate, inequalities of income and wealth.

I also question her statement that we must "do even more to drive down rates of social exclusion". This way of thinking reflects a middle class view that the socially excluded are a problem and simply need to be brought into line. The social work profession seeks to avoid such a patronising approach. Social work is essentially concerned with negotiating between the moral majority and the "deviant" minority, in a non-oppressive way.

The work of the SEU seems increasingly irrelevant to those of us who are committed to tackling poverty and social injustice. What is needed is for the profession to reclaim its radical tradition and re-assert poverty as the big issue.

Hilary Searing
Newport
Wales

The wrong adoptions

Many family-oriented voluntary organisations still have major concerns with the Adoption and Children Bill (News, page 8, 1 November). One is that it is wrong to view attachment disorders in adopted children as involving only children who have come from abusive parents ("The long goodbye", 25 October).

ATD Fourth World meets parents whose children were taken into care and put up for adoption, not because of abuse, but because of poverty. This is irrefutable. Time and time again, families living in poverty are judged by social care professionals as being neglectful parents owing to a misunderstanding of their situation that is born out of an inability to work in partnership with them.

We hope that incoming president of the Association of Directors of Social Services Mike Leadbetter will make the participation of service users experiencing poverty a priority. Abusive parents exist across the social spectrum. But let us work together so that fewer children from poor families are adopted as a result of a lack of understanding, and their children do not have to suffer the trauma of attachment disorder.

Matt Davies
National co-ordinator, ATD Fourth World

Correction

The social workers referred to at the Victoria Climbie inquiry, who stopped attending meetings because they felt ignored by health colleagues worked for Enfield Council, not Haringey Council as stated in our editorial comment last week (15 November).