Safeguarding the safeguarders

Depictions of the machinery of the child protection system have always taxed the media in general and television in particular. Somehow that system eludes the casual reductionism applied to the standard 30 soapy minutes of detectives or doctors. 

The first episode of BBC2's Protecting our Children was a sterling attempt which showed that, in Bristol at least, two children at risk of significant harm were removed and their life prospects almost certainly transformed by decent, dedicated and determined safeguarding professionals. From Maria Colwell to Baby P this is what the system is surely there for. What of the parents whose anger, distress and despair was so graphically portrayed? Perhaps viewers would conclude that the father, unencumbered by insight, would make a poor subject for enlightenment. The mother found herself in that saddest of all places, where her depression and helplessness collided with the torture of the right kind of insight. She decided that her children's needs would have to trump her instincts. So isn't this an example of the triumph of the system? Well, yes and no.

In the 1980s and 1990s we learned how to create services, sometimes called family centres, that further developed the therapeutic traditions of social work seen earlier in family service units and whose concepts later found form in Sure Start. There was a compelling amount of evidence that by engaging failing parents - or at least some of them - that essential component of co-operation could be generated and better parenting skills planted and grown. We were not shown much of that preventive heritage in this first programme and if it had indeed been attempted we should have been told so.

The fence at the top of the cliff takes foresight but is usually cheaper and less painful than the ambulance at the bottom. Such foresight seems to come and go, about once every 30 years. This suggests a rather depressing conclusion in which effective preventive work in child protection is doomed to be rediscovered by each generational crop of professionals. If medicine suffered the same history we might still be cupping and letting.

So far so good, let's see something of social work's therapeutic spirit in the next episode on Monday 6 February.

Andy Lusk is director of autism services at Ambitious about Autism. Follow Ambitious about Autism on Twitter https://twitter.com/#/ambitiousautism