One January, several years ago, Marina*, a social worker working in the north of England, was looking forward to the new year with optimism.
She couldn’t have imagined that by the end of the first week back, she’d be scarred by physical injuries and post-traumatic stress that would keep her awake at night for months to come - all because key information about a child was missing from a risk assessment.
That day, an email had gone out to her team asking if any social workers could spend the evening with a child who was in between placements – mainly to take them out for dinner and keep them company. Marina and a white colleague volunteered.
The risk assessment stated that the child had experienced multiple placement breakdowns due to violent outbursts and had previously attacked a social worker.
The latter made Marina pause, apprehension stirring within her, but her colleague reassured her they had spent time with the child the day before without incident.
An early warning sign
Upon arrival, the two professionals greeted the child, explained the plans for the evening and agreed on a restaurant – when Marina’s phone rang. A manager was calling to check in. After a brief discussion, they asked to speak to the child.But when the phone call ended, the child refused to return Marina’s work phone, instead scrolling through apps and calling professionals on Teams. No amount of coaxing or pleading seemed to work.
“Looking back now, that should have been the first red flag for me,” says Marina now. “I was very worried because my work phone holds confidential information and family photos that go on our system.”
When Marina pushed for the phone again, the response was a swift, painful kick and a dash for the door.
“[The child] had very thick trainers on, so it hurt a lot. I remember bending down and thinking, ‘What was that for? Because I asked for my phone?’”
Feeling like a hostage
After coaxing the child back with the promise of food, the trio were finally on their way to dinner. Though the child apologised, the atmosphere remained tense. Marina had yet to retrieve her phone.It was on the ride back that the situation took a darker turn. In the seven-seater car, the child was still using Marina’s phone, refusing to give it back. When Marina began giving directions to her colleague, who was driving, the child suddenly yanked the car door open. In a panic, the colleague rushed to make an emergency stop.
“You need to shut up or I will jump out of the window,” the child shouted.
Silence ensued. Marina had prior experience of working with dysregulated children, but the aggression she faced that night was unlike anything she had encountered before.
She described feeling like “a hostage” in the car, too afraid to speak and freezing cold from the January breeze coming through the window, which remained open for the rest of the ride back.
“We needed to get [the child] safely back to the accommodation. And they’re about to hurt themselves, threatening to jump from a moving car. That was very, very disturbing for me.”
The assault
When they reached the accommodation, the child ran inside. But when the two professionals approached the door, it was slammed on Marina’s foot, knocking her backwards.Moments later, the door opened once more, but only her colleague was allowed in.
“At that point, I [wondered] what[the child] could hold against me so much that they’d want me not even to come in, especially when I had said I was desperate for the toilet,” Marina tells me.
“I still didn't put it down to racism. I put it down to somebody disliking me. Somebody has a real problem with me trying to help them. So I continued to stand there.”
The next time the door opened, Marina’s world flipped on its axis. Years later, she recalls how the child “pounced” on her in the narrow corridor, trapping her in a corner and repeatedly kicking her in the stomach and punching her in the breast.
“I started shouting ‘What are you doing?’ and pleading with my colleague to take [the child] away. But even when my colleague grabbed hold of the child, they continued to kick me and tried to choke me by twisting the lanyard around my neck.”
In a matter of minutes, Marina had sustained injuries to her neck, stomach and chest. She called 999 and the police arrived swiftly but, by then, she was in debilitating pain.
“I wasn't safe. I was frightened. I was in pain. I was shocked. I was mortified I had put myself through that shift and I was starting to say to myself, ‘I want to be home. I just want to go home to my children’.”
‘I would wake up at night screaming’
The reality sank in when her visibly shaken colleague hugged her in tears, uttering only one sentence: “I’m sorry I’m white.”“For me, that’s when the penny dropped,” Marina tells me now.
“What are we doing if that's the level of risk we're putting black social workers through? Suddenly, I didn’t feel I was in a safe space anymore.”
Following a sleepless night full of pain, Marina ended up at A&E, where she was found to have sustained bruising on her chest - “It was so painful I couldn’t wear a bra” - along with neck abrasions and hematuria (blood in the urine) from the impact on her bladder.
A doctor signed her off work for a month, yet the pain she carried went far beyond the physical. For months, Marina woke in the night screaming.
“My children would come in asking, ‘Mama, are you okay?’. I was screaming because I was seeing it all over again in a flashback. It was awful.”
She was diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress, and bounced from one therapist to another, each saying her trauma ran too deep for standard treatment.
A history of assaults and racist attitudes
Marina’s suspicions that this was a race-related assault were confirmed when a police officer contacted her about pressing charges.They revealed other professionals had been previously attacked and they had been called out for those on several occasions.
“Look, the child has been known to have racist attitudes," said a police officer. "We’ve been called out so many times for this. Why did they allocate you?”
Marina was stunned – her head flooding with questions. Why had no one mentioned that? Why was it not in the risk assessment? If it had been, she tells me, her manager would never have assigned her to the child.
“We need professionals sharing information,” she continues. “Information sharing isn't only to safeguard children. We must share it to safeguard professionals as well, because without us professionals, how can we safeguard the children?”
A lack of responsibility
While Marina and her manager wrote to senior management, in the end, no one took responsibility for the incident.“I made it clear that if this truly isn’t the norm, the first thing I would expect the relevant manager to do is at least write to me and extend apologies for what has happened. I didn't get that.”
However, she stresses that her own team and service manager were incredibly supportive.
Even through her pain, Marina sought not punishment, but a psychological assessment and support to help the child unpick their racism. Unfortunately, that never happened.
“When we don't help our young people [confront their racism], they grow into teenagers and adults who believe it's okay to wave flags around because they don't want immigrants and black people around them,” she says.
“That's who [the child] will become if we don't [intervene]. I wanted to help educate them and [ensure] no one else endures what I had. That is restorative practice and that's what I asked from [my employer]. But no one took responsibility.”
‘We need to be transparent’
Today, many years later, Marina hopes her story serves as a reminder of the importance of honesty and transparency in risk assessments, to protect staff.“This shouldn’t have happened. If the risk assessment had said the child was racist, I would never have done it.”
It took months of therapy and support for her to find forgiveness. She never once contemplated leaving the profession – in fact she missed going to work so much she ended up returning too soon.
“I believe in forgiveness. I was holding space for my own healing while wanting to advocate for them,” she says.
“And to be honest, I did go back too early, but I was missing work and I had missed the children I looked after.”
'Staff's safety should be a priority'
Marina now advocates for safer working conditions for black practitioners, urging services to ensure that safeguarding extends to staff as well as children.“Employers must recognise that social workers are having to constantly manage and navigate risk,” Marina says.
“We need to work collaboratively with other professionals so we’re informed in who we send in to support young people. Let’s share information. The safety of the staff should be priority for services.”
*Name and some details have been changed to protect anonymity
