Centre for Policy Studies

“..So complicated, so elaborate, so costly are the processing mechanisms that they cannot be employed except on a mass scale: hence they eliminate all activities of a fitful, inconsecutive, or humanly subtle nature… That which is local, small, personal, autonomous, must be suppressed. Increasingly, he who controls the processing mechanism controls the lives and destinies of those who must consume its products, and who on metropolitan terms cannot seek any others. For processing and packaging do not end on the production line: they finally make over the human personality…… Process and mechanism is about control.” Lewis Mumford, The City in History 1961

Processes killed Baby P. To describe this as a tragedy, as Brown and Balls have insisted on labelling it, is a misnomer. It is a horror, like the holocaust, over which people presided. Baby P was killed not for lack of visits or for lack of carers, not for lack of meetings, nor for lack of forms or ‘for sharing of relevant information’. He was killed because of today’s preferred form of government; because not one of those involved was brave enough to buck the system the government has imposed, not one of them brave enough to challenge their working practices and compliances and to physically rescue this baby from his torture chamber. He was killed because government apparatchiks have been indoctrinated by the higher demand of process at the price of humanity.

Procedures and systems have become the enemy of responsible social welfare. Process allows, indeed encourages, ‘health professionals’ to abdicate common sense and let go of any personal responsibility for the situations that confront them. Everyone must be supported. No one must act or make judgment. ‘Process’ has imposed a standardised response in which crisis is swallowed up. It suppresses the immediate and urgent response crisis demands.

When Lord Laming conducts his next report into how his previous reforms have been implemented he surely must reflect on this; because child welfare is in multiple crisis and has to be responded to as such.

Back in 2003 it was estimated that some 350,000 children had drug addicted parents; in 2006 it was estimated that a further million children had alcohol addicted parents. Since then the figures have gone up. Adult ‘problem drug users’ total over 400,000 and alcohol problems have got much worse. ‘Treatment’ entails another mass administration, the state sponsored drugging of some 200,000 adults with the prescribed opiate substitute, methadone, now added into the mix. All of this is catastrophic for the increasing numbers of children involved. At best addiction and substance abuse make for neglectful and irresponsible parenting; at worst for cruel and abusive parenting. Yet nothing is being done to protect these children in our progressively administered, morally neutral and non judgemental society. All that has happened is that the threshold of risk that social workers respond to has gone up. It was back in 2003 that the Hidden Harm Report noted that substance abuse was the first thing that social workers met with in their problem families and that it was the last thing to be addressed. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Process demands neutrality and takes right and wrong, good and bad out of the equation. This is no where more apparent than in the treatment process this government has devised for drug addicts. Encouraged to ‘access’ the treatment administration process, addicts are not required to answer for their children or indeed to acknowledge whether they have any or who may be taking responsibility for them, for fear it may put them off. The result is a culture in which drug addiction or alcohol abuse is no longer seen as an index of irresponsible or neglectful parenting; a culture of indifference to children’s most basic of emotional and physical needs.

This is the new liberal fascism created by our process driven government - one which ensures that no one individual is ever responsible or held to account. It has created an anything goes society in which the most vulnerable, children and old people go defenceless.

Yesterday, one it its apparatchiks, Sharon Shoesmith, the conscienceless head of Children’s Services at Haringey, predictably rejected calls for her resignation. She had the gall to say that her department had worked effectively in the case of Baby P and that, “the child was killed by members of its own family, not by anyone who works for social services”.

Our Children’s Minister, Ed Balls, showed up little better and also extracted himself from any responsibility – though being responsible for children’s welfare is the very job that was created. ‘In the end’, he asserted, ‘I can’t account for evil acts by parents, I can’t account for mistakes made by health professionals’. No? If he was honourable he could - if only to show what a grotesque parody his ministry is. His resigning, along with that of Sharon Shoesmith, would be the first and most important marker not just of this government’s acute and chronic failures of direction but for the change in political culture we need. But his performance on Newsnight, last night, showed him to be a slave to the process that that has already caused the damage, that so conveniently protects the incompetent and the self serving, and which he is determined to protect at all costs. ‘I’ve got to stand back’ he declared with staring eyes, ‘and say we’ve got to get the systems in place around the country …’. Tragically he is not standing back at all. He remorselessly continues to drive the system that is at the root of the problem.

Comments

written on 14-Nov-2008

Brat2002 says:

Kathy

Please can you link to the evidence that either of these people were drug-users?

Thanks.
written on 17-Nov-2008

Brat2002 says:

Kathy,

Sorry to bang on about it, but i'm really interested to learn of any evidence that any of the people involved in the abuse of Baby P were 'drug addicted' or ‘problem drug users’. It would certainly put the story in a different light for me.

Otherwise your piece hangs really awkwardly and it appears that you're using the tragedy of Baby P simply as a hook?
written on 19-Nov-2008

mashton [http://findings.org.uk] says:

Kathy, no one knows yet what happened with baby P but if it bears any resemblance to what happened to Victoria Climbié it was not because "procedures and systems" were blindly followed, but because they were not. From the Laming report: "The extent of the failure to protect Victoria was lamentable. Tragically, it required nothing more than basic good practice being put into operation. This never happened ... the presence of mind to follow what are relatively straightforward procedures."

Your comment, "Process demands neutrality and takes right and wrong, good and bad out of the equation," seems to me misguided. There is no conflict between good morality and rigorous processes - the latter is needed to make a reality of the former. In the sector we are both involved in - substance misuse - you see the same thing. Services which care about their clients, also care enough to establish and implement effective procedures like reminder phone calls, follow-up calls and letters, thorough assessment protocols, and rapid admission procedures, and they imbue those procedures with the caring that motivates them. At Drug and Alcohol Findings we investigated this in our Manners Matter series (http://findings.org.uk/issuesResults.php5?iss ... ies+3).

You say addicts entering treatment "are not required to answer for their children or indeed to acknowledge whether they have any or who may be taking responsibility for them, for fear it may put them off. The result is a culture in which drug addiction or alcohol abuse is no longer seen as an index of irresponsible or neglectful parenting; a culture of indifference to children's most basic of emotional and physical needs." How would it help these children if their parents WERE deterred from entering treatment because of the stigma you say should be heaped on them? Or indeed because of an insistence that abstinence was the only acceptable goal and a required short-term outcome? That happened in the 80s and as the ACMD noted, the result was that people just didn't come for treatment. Who does that help?

There is an interesting story - about the genesis of the Strengthening Families Programme, singled out by Cochrane Collaboration reviewers as the most promising "effective intervention over the longer-term for the primary prevention of alcohol misuse." As we recalled in our analysis (http://findings.org.uk/count/downloads/downlo ... 7.pdf), "Patients at a methadone clinic in Salt Lake City provided the impetus. By improving their parenting, they wanted to help their children avoid replicating their own fates and to achieve happiness and success."

For a look at these issues prompted by a study of a home-based child welfare intervention for methadone-maintained parents in Australia, see our analysis at: http://findings.org.uk/count/downloads/downlo ... #PUP. Experience is that methadone patients are keener than the general population to engage in interventions to improve their parenting. In the studies (not many I know), take-up was excellent.

There you will also see that "Across the UK, national targets, service standards and policy statements have recently embodied the perspective that parenting and child welfare are core concerns for addiction treatment services" and that there is now strong pressure for questions to be asked about children because this is required by the national database to which services have to make returns. But as you point out, until recently at least, many don't ask. Why? Because they "did not have assessment procedures which systematically enquired who else shared the home" - it's those procedures again, having them and following them, the practical expression of care. Of course it's not enough, but it would be good start.
Mike Ashton
Drug and Alcohol Findings
http://findings.org.uk

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