Social worker who admired Baby P's mum
Social workers are eternal optimists. If they didn’t believe in the essential goodness of humankind, they’d go for a different career. Yet there is a crucial difference between giving people the benefit of the doubt and being stupidly, stubbornly gullible.
Sue Gilmore, the senior social worker who found Baby P’s mother “really open and completely honest” as shown on Panorama last night, had schooled herself to suppress her instincts and ignore perfectly reasonable doubt. Her zeal utterly eclipsed her commonsense.
In the rest of us, that’s a lapse in judgment, a character flaw. In a social worker it can be the difference between life, for a vulnerable child, and death.