“Protecting our children”, a three-part BBC documentary which ended last week, followed a handful of the complex and harrowing family cases which a team of Bristol social workers were working on over a period of six months. This was documentary TV at its best, getting behind the all too often lurid headlines which fail to present the complicated lives of both parents and children. The programmes showed the trauma of parents seemingly unable to meet the most basic needs of their children.
Throughout the three programmes, I saw parents with bewildered faces who seemed unable to move away from the chaos that was all about them and at any level provide the nurturing home lives which their young children, at this, the most formative stage of their lives – both needed and deserved. The programmes made for uncomfortable viewing, life in the raw and often seemingly hidden from view from much of society.
The parents included drug-addicted Marva and Shaun who had already had to face the consequences of having had three children taken from them. They were now being closely supervised by social worker Annie as she assessed whether they would be in a position to keep the baby which Marva was now carrying. For both parents the chaos of their lives seemed to have become the consistency with which they felt most comfortable. When instructed by Annie as to the significant changes that would have to be made if they were to keep this baby once she was born, they seemed almost destined to fail. Time and again we heard Shaun talk of the abuse and neglect he had suffered as a child, clearly wanting more for his own child but just as evidently not knowing how to stop the destructive cycle in which he had now become a key player.
The social workers remarked that their jobs were structured by the “chaotic” choices that their clients routinely made; Annie talked about the frequent feeling of “wanting to walk away” as clients such as Marva and Shaun became seemingly ever more self-destructive, with routine drugs overdoses, binge drinking and bouts of self-harm. Perhaps not surprisingly after Marva’s baby was taken into care, Annie had to take two weeks off on sick leave; the toll of the emotional struggle of working tirelessly in the pursuit of a different outcome for all concerned was simply too gruelling.
What came across time and again was an absence of the emotional hard-wiring needed to parent effectively. Clearly these were parents who struggled with the practical skills to support their children, but perhaps more importantly they were often devoid of the emotional resilience and strength required to deal with the legacy of the destructive and brutalised lives which they themselves had been dealt as children.
With 10,000 children taken into care in 2011 in England alone (an increase of 12% on the previous year), what we witnessed in the three hours of programming was stark evidence that children who suffer from the effects of neglect and abuse will often later in life be destined to create new trauma for the next generation. If we are to move away from the high personal, social and ultimately economic cost of the crisis intervention approach which we saw these social workers delivering, surely our only choice as a society is to intervene more effectively at an earlier stage and call time on the bleak cycle of destruction that these families are facing.
Catherine Henderson is Business Development Manager for The Place2Be in Scotland.







