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SCANDAL, SOCIAL POLICY AND WELFARE
STAR RATING: 4/5

Ian Butler and Mark Drakeford,
The Policy Press
ISBN: 1861347464, £24.99

Under pressure from the tabloid media, the eagerness to spot a scandal can make an already difficult job for social care professionals well nigh impossible, writes Anthony Douglas. 

This well-written and thoughtful book is a social history of scandals, which helps put today's approach to handling scandals into perspective. Psychiatrists no longer claim to be able to detect mental illness by its smell as they once did, but we still have scandals in the making in our midst which we fail to prevent.

Along with scandal inflation comes scandal fatigue. Butler and Drakeford expertly review the sequence of exposure, analysis and policy shifts. They demonstrate how little real change can be directly attributed to the explosion in the number of inquiries.

Anthony Douglas is chief executive, Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, and chair of Baaf, Adoption and Fostering