Tuesday 11 November 2008

Baby P and the ology

Following hot on the heels of absurd action by social workers in the case of Hannah Jones we have the tale of absurd dithering and weakness by social workers in the case of Baby P. Sometimes I read of events that are so far beyond my comprehension I am unsure what to make of them. Baby P was regularly beaten and shaken so badly his spine was broken and he had more than fifty separate injuries by the time his tiny body could not take any more and he died at the age of just seventeen months. Despite sixty visits from social services, Baby P was left with his mother so that the abuse could escalate.

I am not going to discuss that case in any detail because there is nothing to say about the mother and her male friends except that they are complete scum. Totally unfit to be in charge of a child. Lowlifes of a kind any sensible person with a balanced outlook on life can recognise easily. I will add, in passing, that there seems to be only one reason why the mother and her boyfriend cannot be named. It is because they have another child or other children, and what a dreadful thought that is.

What I do want to discuss is the contrast between how social workers dealt with Baby P and how they act in other cases. Just a few weeks ago we learned that children might be taken into care if they are obese, last week we heard that one council will not place foster children with couples who smoke tobacco and earlier today we read the tale of Hannah Jones, threatened with being taken into care because she and her parents did not follow the thought processes required by social workers. The mind truly boggles at the concept of a child being taken into care because his parents feed him too much while a small baby is left at home to have his tender bones snapped by acts of random thuggishness. How can these things all happen under the watch of (self-proclaimed) "professional" people? There are two reasons, self-importance and naivety.

The last thing social workers want is to lose their jobs and comfortable pensions, so they have to be seen to be doing something to justify their existence. The last thing they want is a society in which people lead contented lives and bring up children independently of "expert" "help". The wider they can define the circumstances requiring their involvement, the safer their own careers will be. So they must be on the lookout for new perceived dangers, new threats to youthful wellbeing. Perhaps this became inevitable when some bright spark had the idea of calling social workers "professionals". No doubt he or she was related to the fraudsters who invented sociology and called it a social "science". Vague and essentially political analyses of how people behave became respectable as a field of study because they formed an "ology" and every ologist is a scientist, just as worthy of our respect and admiration as those in labs with white coats and lengths of glass tubing containing combustible materials. The more politicians sought to interfere with how people lived their lives, the more these new scientists were needed to enforce the ideal. But it's not political, it's not social engineering for political ends, it's a science; this we know because it is an ology and an ology is substantive not just a matter of opinion. We cannot have people defying science, it is bad for them. They must be stopped and that can only be done by those who understand the complexities of the new ology, only "professional" people could possibly achieve something so difficult and important. And only constant and ever widening enforcement of the forms of behaviour defined as beneficial by the new ology can ensure that its full benefit can flourish for society as a whole. After a while it had been around long enough to no longer be a new ology, then it was a fully fledged established ology. In the minds of its practitioners it is not the new ology but the ology (gap optional).

A central tenet of the ology is that people cannot cope without complex formal networks of "help" because they are victims of society as it was before the ology was discovered. The old discredited society of self-belief, mutual-support and family is so deeply ingrained that victimhood is imposed at birth. Only the ology recognises the need to break free from such oppressive cultural chains and only professional practitioners of the ology can achieve this essential end.

Baby P, in the eyes of a the ologist was a victim but only because his mother and her various partners were also victims. Their base behaviour showed them to be some of the most vulnerable victims of all. They had to be helped. Baby P could not be removed from them for that would suggest that they have failed whereas it is society that has failed them. The ology required Baby P to be kept at home to give the mother the greatest possible chance of benefitting from help given by the ologists.

To any sensible person the mother's problems would be subordinated to the need to keep her baby from risk, after all the baby has no choice about how he will be treated whereas the mother has. To any sensible person it would have taken just one bruise combined with an unchanged nappy to give the excuse needed to remove Baby P from a junkie mother whose infant was dirty and injured regularly, someone who obviously didn't give a damn about his wellbeing. Let's get one thing clear: sixty visits over a life of seventeen months is an average of one every 8.6 days. That could not happen unless it was patently obvious that Baby P was in serious danger. But the ologists are a naive group for whom leaving a baby in danger can be a sensible thing to do to relieve the mother's victimhood.

Until adults who choose to live and behave like scum are seen for what they are, there will be more and more cases like Baby P. You can have any number of enquiries and reviews but they can achieve nothing unless the ologists are prepared to bite the bullet and call a spade a spade. The social workers did not just turn up on spec those sixty times, on many occasions they would have received a phone call from a concerned neighbour; quite possibly someone too scared of the violent junkie and her scum friends to approach them directly. If a neighbour can see what is going on there is no excuse for so-called professionals.


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