The 'too hard to do' list resonates iam64. Challenging powerful, popular people about their behaviour can be tantamount to professional suicide. My line manager and I complained about someone in an executive position after he made disparaging remarks about sexual abuse victims who had attended a conference to speak to child protection specialists in the early 90s, simply because they didn't use objective language like other speakers had. His sexist and patronising remarks shocked the delegates, but no-one challenged him. Instead they gossiped about what they knew of his private life, which concerned us even more.
We wrote to him, copying in the chief executive and our chief, laying out specific examples of what he had said and done in front of us, and a week later we were summoned to head office and put in our place. Who did we think we were? Weeks later, he sent us both some flowers (eh??). Soon after that he resigned, taking early retirement. Yet another who got warning shots and disappeared, but if only we had been supported. If professionals can be stopped from expressing their misgivings about what they see going on around them, how difficult it must be for powerless children. There must be thousands of tentative complaints dismissed as 'too hard to do' that are now being looked at again.
