That is one of the reasons that I no longer work for the NSPCC. I left a good few years ago when the fundraising and advertising appeared to be overshadowing the good work that people were doing. There were occasions when I was encouraged not to share with people making donations what work I was actually doing. For example working with young abusers or perpetrators of domestic violence. This is because most of the people making donations want to believe that their money is going to poor little children who are being neglected and the marketing people did not want to upset them.
Those hard hitting adverts were a little wide of the mark as interestingly enough, all of the heavy end child protection stuff that is referred to the various agencies (NSPCC, Barnardoes, NCH, etc) is always passed on to the local Social Services Department to deal with as the voluntary agencies do not have statutory powers to deal with child protection and undertake enquires. People do not realise that. The NSPCC still has some statutory powers to investigate but have not used this for years.
When I worked for the NSPCC doing 'child protection work' I was viewed as almost a 'saint' by the public. (Good Marketing).
When I was doing child protection work for the Local Authority and Courts I was viewed as 'a do gooder', 'child snatcher', 'interfering b"%*!$d'. When I was actually doing good work and dealing with the referrals passed on to us by the NSPCC. (Bad / No Marketing).
It is all about perception and marketing. Guess who has a marketing budget?
Most of the agencies including the NSPCC do a great job of what they actually do. But it is not front line child protection work. The people that do that are the Local Authority Social Workers who get all the flack when something goes wrong.
The situations in the adverts being mentioned in this thread would all have been dealt with by the Local Authority Social Services Department. Once the children / young person was then safe, they may then be referred to the NSPCC, Barnardoes, etc for some work. The Local Authority would then be charged for this work by that agency. Most Local Authorities cannot afford to pay!!
If it is any consolation, Social Workers that I worked with at the NSPCC also cringed at those adverts as they knew that any child protection situations had to be passed to the Local Authority. Most of them were embarrassed to think that the public thought they were out there rescuing children.
Anyway, sermon over.
Happy Christmas to all.
Chris
. Why put these adverts on TV???? :nono:
