About the Leicester Mencap picture

Last week, someone posted a picture to the Mencap Facebook page, and the picture has been widely shared on social media and has found its way into the mainstream press. It shows a young woman standing next to an elderly man in a wheelchair, in a small recess outside two fire exits. The woman is smoking and is talking on a mobile phone. The man has shopping hanging from the handles of his wheelchair and three bags piled on his lap tray, one of which is pressing into his face. Mencap responded by telling the original poster they were "appalled" and had suspended the support worker in the picture and reported it to the relevant local authority safeguarding team; the picture has generated outrage in the learning disability blogging community; Neil Crowther and Mark Neary both posted articles which took apart Mencap's response to the picture. Personally, while I agree with the criticism of Mencap, I think we are jumping to too many conclusions about the woman's behaviour. (I've not named the woman or her home town in this article.)

The original poster knew the name of the care worker and where she came from. She also knew she worked for Mencap, despite there being no Mencap logos on display. We have to ask how she knew this. A second person on the Facebook thread attached to the image claims that she has also been sharing details about the man and his care and that she has "evidence"; again, one must ask where she gets this "evidence" from (I did a search on Facebook for someone by that name and from that location; it returned no results). People on Facebook weren't satisfied with Mencap's assurances that they have suspended the woman; they said she should have been sacked immediately, despite there being laws to protect workers from summary dismissal on the basis of flimsy or specious evidence, such as assumptions made about a photo.

The Sun and Daily Mail both ran versions of the story, with the Sun's in particular uncritically giving the original poster's version of the story, claiming that the woman was "supposed to take him on a trip out of the home to give him fresh air and a break" but instead "went shopping and piled her bags all over him". The support worker refused to comment in both versions; the Mail has invited readers to contact them via a named email address if they know the support worker or the service user, while the Sun quotes an anonymous neighbour of hers in her home town saying she "only seems to care about herself" and is "clearly not suited to caring at all" (note: the press can and frequently do make up quotes from anonymous neighbours, 'friends', 'sources close to X' etc.). I am not sure if the "businesswoman" who took the picture had been following the pair or just happened to see her as she walked by. But looking at the picture, the ground is wet and it may have been raining, so the alternative to putting the shopping on the man's lap tray would have been to put it on the ground which, as it is in paper bags, would have got it wet. We are invited to assume that the shopping is all hers; there is no evidence of that and we cannot see any logos on two of the three bags (TK Maxx do stock men's as well as women's clothing, by the way).

The woman may be bad at her job, but as there is no evidence of her using violence against him, treating him roughly or being verbally abusive (and if the "businesswoman" had acquired any such evidence, she would surely have posted it with the woman's name attached), I really don't believe that exposing her by name on social media and in the national press is necessary or appropriate. There are possible explanations to this picture which are not abusive; that some of the shopping might have been his, or for him; that the phonecall might have been to or from her Mencap bosses, or to whoever was looking after her child about some urgent matter; that they'd taken shelter from rain in the recess and weren't there long and there might have been nowhere else to stop that wasn't wet or crowded; that she may have been calling a cab. The woman's face and name have been made public, but whoever took her on, whoever may be responsible for recruiting "idiots on minimum wage", as someone on social media referred to her and others like her, whoever sets her workload, hasn't been.

Of course, if she really did do a personal shopping trip while she was meant to be taking the man out for "some fresh air", then pile her shopping on top of his chair while having a cigarette and a natter on the phone, that's clearly unacceptable, but we're being asked to assume the worst about her by someone who seems to know a lot about her and may have a personal grudge against her. She could easily have posted the picture to Mencap and to social services privately, rather than post it straight onto a public Facebook page with identifying information. As for the "minimum wage idiots", we'll continue to get bad care from some of the large number of poorly-paid carers as long as we aren't willing to fund good care by giving carers proper training and paying them accordingly. The tabloids that gleefully shame a young woman for not being a good enough carer have spent years cheering on cuts to disability benefits, to the local governments who provide these sorts of services, to the legal profession that fights for people's rights, and will be the first to attack any proposal to raise the taxes necessary to raise care standards by training and paying decent carers.