ABSTRACT
Social workers, it seems to author, stand on the frontiers of our society, asked to do an impossible job with totally inadequate resources, but worse, with no moral support from the rest of us. Before Kimberley Carlile was brutally murdered, his imagined social work terror was to be involved in a case where a child's death occurred and he could be held to be partially responsible. On 5 May 1987, after what appeared a very long bank holiday weekend, he arrived at the Central Criminal Court and began a two-day wait to give evidence. During the inquiry the press coverage was reasonably quiet, though on the first day a television camera crew filmed him going into the building only to realize they had not loaded the camera. The independent television production Dispatches gave a balanced insight into the process and issues that came to the attention of the inquiry.
