Abused, betrayed and neglected by ‘caring’ social services

 

First things first: everything is alright at Independence Daily Towers. I didn’t feel a thing nor did I wake up nor was my resident collie disturbed. I am of course speaking of yon earthquake which hit the Rhondda around midnight. It’s coming to something though when a national rag, the DM, has a better report with a good geological map (link) than the local rag, i.e. walesonline (link). Perhaps it was just a kick up the posterior for the Welsh rugby players facing England later today …

Next, the usual romp across the print MSM front pages (link). Gawd, it’s all so tedious and predictable. Again, honours go to The Star, now fully into turnips. Allegedly people are ‘stockpiling’ them as supermarkets have sold out of yon veg. ‘Tis nice of theStar reporters to elevate Ms Coffey’s quip into ‘government guidance’.

There was one report published yesterday evening in the DT which is worth referring to because it illuminates the utterly dire straits government services are in. It also provides a background for the larger scandal described in a book which was published two days ago. I’ve read yon book during the last couple of days. It describes a scandal which, although it has its roots in the last century, is symptomatic of our woke-drenched society. More on that below.

And so, to the report: it is about a ‘team manager’ for social services dealing with vulnerable children who WFH, living more than 100 miles away from the team and those children (this and the following emphases are mine):

“A social worker for vulnerable children in Gloucester lives and works from home on the Isle of Wight, The Telegraph can reveal. The manager, who oversees a team looking after disabled children, lives more than 100 miles away. A one-way trip takes four hours, including a ferry journey. The issue has been raised by the parents of Jacob Parsons, who has autism, ADHD, and Tourette’s syndrome. He struggles with mood swings, agitation and anxiety.” (paywalled link)

It gets worse. This  manager, WFH  from the Isle of Wight, had of course underlings in her team, one of whom was the case worker for this poor boy. You couldn’t make this up:

“Jacob’s social worker predominantly works from her home in Malvern, Worcester, around an hour’s drive from the family home in Gloucester, they claim. They say she has cancelled and rescheduled five face-to-face visits over the past year. Meanwhile, the team leader lives in the Isle of Wight. They say they have only met her in person once, 18 months ago.” (paywalled link).

Another WFHer … I hope the Starmer-wing of the Uniparty will refrain from bleating about ‘Toree cuts’ when their sacred social workers are happily WFH, not even seeing their clients. The weasel words of Gloucester Council deserve to be quoted, for the record:

“Gloucestershire County Council’s children’s services previously had an inadequate rating. In April 2022, Ofsted rated it as “requires improvement to be good”. A spokesperson for Gloucestershire County Council said: “We always aim to provide all children and families with the best possible support that most effectively meets their needs. We will always look into any concerns or issues raised with us, either in relation to our services or a family’s experience of engaging with us. We are sorry to hear the family are dissatisfied and we will continue working with them to discuss their concerns and see what other options may be possible.”  (paywalled link)

How nice: the councils’ aims are so good, how dare people to be ‘dissatisfied’! At least they’ll ‘keep working with them’ rather than just chucking them to the wolves for having dared to complain. 

This example is the perfect background for the book I mentioned above. Its title is “Time to think”, the author is Hannah Barnes. It’s about the scandal at GIDS, at the Tavistock Trust, which was originally set up to help children with gender dysphoria, using ‘talking therapies’, e.g. psychoanalysis. This service was started in 1989.

In the mid-noughties the medical ‘therapy’ using puberty blockers was introduced. This solution was then pushed as the only therapy from the 2010s onwards. It was meant to give those children ‘time to think’ about their gender ‘choice’ while alleviating their distress from going through puberty. 

The decision to use those puberty blockers, even on children as young as 10 years old, was based on one (!) report by a Dutch clinic. That report had been picked up around the world even though the Dutch selection criteria for their small number of clients was never applied.

The heads of GIDS did try to develop a research project because obviously nobody knew at that time if and for whom the treatment would work best. That project was rejected by the research council because there was no control group – an unforgivable error. The excuse that the children were suffering and needed to be treated is and remains unacceptable because the aim of that clinic was ‘speaking therapies’, not medical intervention. A control group was thus readily available.

The book describes how local social services referred more and more troubled kids to the clinic where the NHS would pay for their treatment, washing their local social services’ hands off them. These kids showed the same spectrum of mental illnesses as the boy mentioned in the report on the WFH ‘manager’. If such children mentioned ‘gender’, they were sent off to be ‘treated’. I learned a new word though: children are no longer ‘in care’, they are now ‘looked-after children’, I kid you not.

Then there are the numbers. From around 2015 onwards, more and more adolescent girls were referred, demanding this treatment which was meant for children who had not yet entered puberty. Nobody asked why that suddenly was the case. Authors in the USA had already pointed out the pernicious influence of social media and pressure groups, but those clinicians who did raise their concerns were brushed off by their clinic managers and were accused of being ‘trans-phobe’. 

Repeatedly the book describes how severely troubled children were referred to this sex-change clinic without anyone in those local authorities providing any service alleviating these mental illnesses. Some clinicians at GIDS who did not put those kids on the medical conveyor belt of puberty blockers – sex hormones – surgery found that ‘talking treatment’, when given a chance, made those ‘gender change wishes’ go away. Meanwhile nobody knows what the long-term effects are which those newly ‘trans’ children will face later in life.

One significant attitude in that clinic, from the top down, was that these children ‘knew’ what they wanted. They were not to be questioned because that was ‘disrespectful and trans-phobic’. When figures of authority – and what could be more authoritative than a clinical psychoanalyst! – are working from the premise that ‘the child is right’ it’s not surprising that kids have grown up with no boundaries. This mindset, after all, is taught at universities and has been trickling down into medical and social services as well as schools for a generation.

We should also ask how and why it is that WFH is still acceptable in areas where personal contact, face-to-face, is of huge importance. The incessant wail that there’s no money for more social workers falls flat on its face when one becomes aware of the many ‘managers’ managing ‘compliance’ of their underlings, never mind all the ‘diversity’ and other ‘managers. 

The full title of the book is “Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children”, the author is Hannah Barnes. You can buy it in all the usual places. If there are reviews in tomorrow’s papers I’ll let you know.

That’s all I have for today. Frankly, after reading this book I am even more disgusted by our MSM which provide propaganda theatre rather than spending time and effort to dig out the scandals up and down the country perpetrated by ideology driven ‘social’ services, schools, academe and medicine. Have a good weekend.



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