From the dept. of "I'm sure they mean well"

[mirrorshard]

From today's Observer:

Last year my wife, already buried up to her neck in the business of raising our four children, tried to persuade a local agency to consider us as foster parents. She was told, almost sniffily, that this would be impossible because we did not have a spare room. The woman at the other end of the phone was also concerned that there were too many young children in the house. We were amazed that our admittedly chaotic but nevertheless loving home, overlooking the Weald of Kent and crammed with youngsters, could be seen as an unsuitable place for a vulnerable and wounded child.

What kind of crack-addled half-witted prating fool would even consider trying to foster a 'vulnerable and wounded child' without being able to give them their own safe space, let alone dumping them straight into the company of four strange children they can't get away from?

Comments

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Quite. I wouldn't want that family fostering: they don't have the space, they already have four young children, they can't understand that a foster child would need privacy, and they think that such things as police checks and disability training are a waste of time. Wouldn't it be fun if they turned out to be homophobic too ("good Christian family values" or whatever) and got a LGBT youngster to foster?

The assumption that all volunteers are lovely people is naive beyond belief. D, who's the assistant manager (i.e. one of only two salaried staff) at a charity bookshop, recently went through no end of hassle from the higher-ups because £50 vanished one day when he was running the shop. A variety of volunteers were in that day at various times. The next week, more money vanished. After that, the new volunteer who'd been there both times never showed up again and evaded all attempts at contact, so it was pretty definite it was him, but not before D had been grilled endlessly on exactly what had happened when he'd taken money to the bank and so forth. (The first time he was frantically triple-checking everything in case he'd made a mistake himself, not that he thought he had, mainly because he didn't want to think one of the volunteers was a thief.) I'm still a little shocked that the charity let it slide and didn't call in the police. And people are against police checks for volunteers?

As for disability training, try being disabled in today's world.