Prejudice is useful: it keeps people safe - social workers need to learn this

I assume those authorities who come into daily contact with less salubrious members of the general public are now supposed to think and act in all situations on the tabula rasa principle – i.e. with their minds unclouded by the sort of prejudices that result from  experience. Either that, or they've been brainwashed into believing that normal lifestyles are the new deviancy.

Tyler Whelan

For instance, Tyler Whelan, a five-year old Peterborough boy, is brought into A&E on three separate occasions with a variety of injuries, including a broken leg and an injury to his penis. The hospital contacts social services because staff suspect that something's not right. The boy is living with his working-class slapper mother and her boyfriend, who has a history of violence. Social services decide no intervention is needed.

You and I, because we haven’t been sent on courses to unlearn everything life has taught us, might have assumed that the violent boyfriend has something to do with the child’s injuries. But social workers have evidently been taught not to be so fuddy-duddily judgmental: they’ve had it drummed into them that there’s nothing intrinsically more stable about the boring, old-fashioned, repressive “child living with its married mother and father” lifestyle choice than there is about the alternative and perfectly viable “child who always seems to be getting injured living with its slapper mother and her psychopathic boyfriend who isn’t the child’s biological father” set-up. Indeed, the latter might, in many ways, provide a more vibrant and authentically gritty environment than the former.

Tyler Whelan was eventually kicked to death by the psychopathic boyfriend, who was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to seventeen years in prison two weeks ago (the killer will be 51 should he serve his full term – I have absolutely no idea why anyone would even think of ever allowing this vile creature to enjoy freedom again). The numerous injuries found on Tyler after his death included a human bite-mark.

Five years old. A human bite mark!

The authorities have intoned their standard “mistakes were made, lessons have been learnt” mantra (the secular equivalent of Hail Marys). A Serious Case Review found a "lack of professional curiosity" among agencies involved in the case.

I’m simply astonished that, when the hospital alerted them, social services didn’t break into a collective sweat-panic and burn rubber racing to the child’s home in order to remove him to a place of safety. The journalist Christopher Booker is always highlighting cases where the authorities have removed children from their loving, married, biological parents on the flimsiest of pretexts – and have then lied through their teeth to stop the parents getting their kids back.

Are we now living in an era where social engineering has become so pervasive that social workers consider married parents more worthy of scrutiny than chav mothers and whoever they happen to be shacked up with at the time?  

An open mind isn't always a good thing. Prejudice isn't always a bad thing.

Rest in peace, Tyler Whelan.