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Reporting the Opposite of the Facts

September 22, 2013 permalink

Christopher Booker says that television is part of the problem with child protection. Instead of exposing the excessive intervention in families, Britain's Channel 4 television asks questions such as: why do social workers have a culture that is so resistant to taking children into care, so resistant to intervening?

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Do your homework, Jon Snow

Social workers are far from reluctant to take children into care

family law
Two minutes’ homework could have told Jon Snow that, far from being “resistant” to intervening, applications by social workers to take one or more children into care have in the past five years more than doubled
Photo: Alamy

At its best, Channel 4 News reporting is second to none. But when it comes to biased and self-righteously picky interviewing, its presenters, such as Jon Snow and Krishnan Guru-Murthy, kick Jeremy Paxman, John Humphrys and Co off the park.

Discussing a report on the failure of Coventry’s “child protection” agencies to save little Daniel Pelka from being starved and battered to death, Snow asked the head of the Association of Directors of Social Services why social workers “have a culture that is so resistant to taking children into care, so resistant to intervening”.

Viewers must have asked: “What planet is Snow living on?” Two minutes’ homework could have told him that, far from being “resistant” to intervening, applications by social workers to take one or more children into care have in the past five years more than doubled, from below 400 a month to nearly 1,000. So hell-bent are our social workers on tearing families apart that the number of children in care in England has soared to a record 67,000.

The real scandal here, as I report week after week, is that far too many are removed from their parents for wholly bogus reasons – let alone that too many suffer abuse in “care” much worse than anything alleged against their parents. That is the story Channel 4 should be looking into. But it would be much too “politically incorrect” for them even to think of doing so.

Source: Telegraph (UK)

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