The real road to hell A666 Salford Bolton

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• Description : The Daily Mail and its lies about c...(more)hild protectionJanet SnellThe Daily Mail is vile. Everybody, apart from its readers, must know that. But the problem is the sheer number of people who do read it -- more than the Guardian, Times, Telegraph and Independent put together!Many social workers, with their tendency to a more liberal and tolerant world view, prefer to just ignore the Mail and all it stands for. But the trouble is the Mail doesn't ignore them back.It feeds the 2.3million people who read it every day a constant drip drip of poison against social care staff, questioning the profession's competence as well as its motives.And I say 2.3million -- that's the number who buy it, meaning that at least twice that number read it. That's quite frightening really.It suggests that almost 5 million people will have seen the story yesterdayabout the "scandalous" behaviour of social workers who have told a woman called Fran Lyon they plan to take her baby away from her shortly after it is born. The piece is written in an emotional, some would say lurid, style, detailing how the woman, "who has never harmed anyone" does not know if she will get to hold her baby.It's clearly a very sad case but, as every child care professional reading it will know, there is another side to the story. A side that those 5 million Mail readers will not get to hear.Why should we care about what Mail readers think? Well, for one thing it helps stoke up real hatred against social workers. The story of Fran Lyon prompted one person to write a blog headed "Save A Life -- Shoot A Social Worker"That can't be a good thing.But, for what it's worth, Community Care readers will get to hear the other side. On September the 20th we will be running a feature examining the way Fran Lyon's story was hijacked by the Mail (and the Telegraph) through no fault of her own and how key facts about her psychiatric history were omitted.Some Community Care readers have written in saying they don't want to read about "child-snatcher" allegations against social workers in the national media. Notably 32 members of the social work team at Bolton Council protested at our coverage of John Hemmings and his claims that children were being taken into care to meet adoption targets.I think Community Care shouldn't ignore every anti-social worker story that appears in the national media (though you have to ignore a lot of them otherwise it becomes too exhausting!) Hopefully our coverage of Hemmings -- and the forthcoming feature on the Lyon case -- is helping, just a tiny bit, to set the record straight. It's at least worth a try, surely?Posted by Janet Snell on September 7, 2007 12:29 PM | PermalinkTrackBack (less)