Segona part: Agustí Eura, bisbe d’Ourense

This next lengthy but detailed extract provides some crucial yet also valuable information with regards to how the VK centre began:

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CPP: Have you been told about the Battered Child Commission? J: No

CPP: Well that was the beginning of this agency. That was in the University hospital and Henry Kempe, you know him?

J: Yes

CPP: His article said that it was better that the service was reinvented to create that new knowledge. So the University picked up on this and in Leuven, Professor Eggermont- that is our founding father- he picked up the idea and he formed the Battered Child

Commission where you had doctors and nurses coming together to discuss children who had bruises and stuff like that that were not normal or non accidental. That was the very beginning and the same thing was occurring in Antwerp and in Brussels. From those initiatives people came together and were doing some policy practice working on people in the Government saying ‘we need something on child abuse and neglect we need to make a centre’ and that was the making of the confidential centre and so it came from bottom up and not from the clients but practitioners who found there was a need for this kind of centre and now thirty years later there is a big discussion, it has worked all the time, these centres have built up some kind of expertise which is recognised by our society. Those centres for thirty years have been left alone but have created a movement against violence against women and everybody developed respect for that. We also had the Dutroux affair which reinforced our centres and now we have a whole lot of issues with abuse in the church so again reinforcement for everything that is to do with child abuse and neglect and so we have been left alone and nowadays we see a new movement from Government and policy makers which are regulating more and more and more. They are not only regulating money flows but also regulating what needs to happen there. (Interview, Day 21).

In 1962, Dr. Henry Kempe and his colleagues from the USA, identified and recognised child abuse in a defining paper entitled ‘The Battered Child Syndrome’. In 1976 Professor Eggermont who was from Flanders, Belgium, and based at the University Hospital Gasthuisberg subsequently set up the Battered Child Commission so when this CPP refers to the organisation as originating from the grassroots, he does not mean the idea for VK came from the clients but from the medical professionals who worked at the hospital. The idea therefore originated from a medical model of child abuse and was, therefore, not created by the Government’s idea of what a welfare system should look like but was instead supported by it financially.

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Kind en gezin (child and family) recognised the importance of the VK agency and agreed to fund it via the budget it received from the Government which is why VK is so closely linked to Kind en gezin and not the Government. VK is not therefore a statutory agency although it has the same powers as a statutory social service department in the UK does. Up until recently, they have had the freedom to operate without Government regulation for many years. This has enabled them to fight for different causes and, as a result of making the public aware of these different societal issues, they have been able to develop and build upon an admirable reputation.

So when scandals have hit the press, such as the Dutroux affair or the sexual abuse within the catholic church, the public are not looking to blame the agency, as Hetherington et al. (1997) (see section 2.7) thought they might do following their experience of what happened post-Cleveland Inquiry in the UK, but are instead persuaded that there is a need for an agency such as VK.

4.3.5 Summary

Although the Government may be seen as a distant dictator for some of the social workers within the Fenton department, it is evident that the impact it has had is much more powerful than some have had the time to consider. In this section, we have seen how, when under pressure from the public and the media, the UK Government panics and responds hastily by taking on the role of ‘Mr. Macho’ and seeking to swiftly transfer unwanted attention onto an individual professional. Rather than protect their public sectors, the Government immediately assumes an error has been made by the child protection social work department and without pausing creates a political distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’. The data shows that this

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in our society’ has a detrimental impact on the social worker, as it leaves them feeling devalued, insignificant and at risk (Goffman, 1959: 71). And it also serves to develop my assertion that social workers are stigmatised as professionals.

In Flanders however, we see the Government play an entirely different role. Although they recognised some 25 years ago that there was a need for a specialist agency such as VK, they did not interfere with its inauguration and instead left it to the medical profession to develop and advance the idea. The Government has felt no need to control the agency (up until now). This lack of regulation has provided professionals from VK with a creative licence to progress with their work in whichever way they want. As we have seen, from these extracts, this has had a

positive impact on the way these professionals construct their identity as they talk of being revered, feeling like experts and being appreciated for the work that they do with families.