ABSTRACT
Until the Cleveland events of 1987-8, the symbol of social work’s ‘bad press’ was a sad list of children’s names, connoting criminal trials for the killing of a child, perhaps followed by an official inquiry. The venom of some press comment in these cases, saturated with the assumption that social work intervention must have failed, seems to have led many in the profession to assume that any similar instance will inevitably produce the same kind of news coverage.
