Recently in stand up now for social work Category

The icy relationship between employers of social workers and the press was brought into focus last week when I began gathering reaction for a Community Care article on the profession's first ever national college.

I rang several contacts asking them for their views on the priorities of the college, which is being developed to provide a stronger national voice for social workers across the country.

Most of them were happy to be quoted but the level of bureaucracy was quite astounding.

Oh dear - our friends at The Sun are at it again. The tabloid's report of the General Social Care Council conduct hearings for the Peter Connelly case in the 27 May edition is not only biased but inaccurate. They even managed to get the GSCC's name completely wrong.

Continuing the theme of our Stand Up Now for Social Work campaign, Community Care has written this open letter to The Sun's editor, Dominic Mohan.

I would urge as many Community Care readers as possible to write into The Sun to complain, and if you're not satisfied with the response, contact the Press Complaints Commission.

One in three social workers is being bullied by his or her current manager, according to a straw poll by Community Care. We asked more than 780 readers, "Is your current manager a bully?" and around 250 answered, "Yes".

Also this week, a Unison workplace survey found two thirds of staff at Rotherham Council were being bullied or had been in the past, according to the Rotherham Advertiser.

Should unions and professional associations do more to engage social work students? This was one of the central questions raised at the first ever student-organised social work conference, which took place at London South Bank University this week.

"When I became a student, I expected BASW or Unison to come to me," said Dan Morton, a second year undergrad and one of the conference organisers. "But it never happened."

25 February 2010 marks the tenth anniversary of Victoria Climbié's death. Over the course of the last decade there have been major changes in child protection policies in the UK. But for one social worker involved in the case, life is still frozen in a state of uncertainty.

In the aftermath of Victoria's death, social worker Lisa Arthurworrey was vilified by the media and hounded out of the profession. She was put on the Protection of Children Act (PoCA) list and banned from working with children.

Community Care is doing a survey on violence against social workers in light of the Ashleigh Ewing and Shauna Bailey cases earlier this month. So far 29 people have taken part. Of those, 82% have been abused, assaulted or threatened with violence while working in social care. In the majority of cases, the perpetrator was a service user and the social worker was verbally attacked.

A social worker was stalked for more than six years by a man she visited as part of a mental health assessment team.

The service user, Richard Jan, made numerous silent phone calls to social worker Shauna Bailey, attempted to torch her car and twice assaulted her, once beating her face repeatedly with a brick. Read more

This is an extreme case, but it raises interesting questions about whether stalking and prolonged abuse is a widespread problem. If so, what is being done to support social workers? Is abuse like this being properly recorded?

Have you ever been stalked by a service user? Have your say on CareSpace

A social worker has emerged as one of the front runners in the race to become the next Labour parliamentary candidate for Wavertree, Liverpool.

It reminded us in the Community Care office that, back in August, the Tories said "lots of social workers" had applied to stand as candidates in the next election.

Are we going to see a sudden surge of social worker MPs in 2010?