ABSTRACT
Social workers have to endure criticism as an inevitable component of their jobs. They use various defences as protection: insufficient resources; inadequate management or training, and so on. These constraints are indeed endemic but if social workers were well managed, excellently resourced, thoroughly and continuously trained, would they be immune from the attacks, fierce and sober, thoughtful and thoughtless, which are commonplace in public discourse? The answer must be no. Social workers are peculiarly vulnerable to criticism, more than many other professional groups, because they work daily with moral and political conundrums of dreadful complexity.
