One of the fundamental flaws of the government's 'Big Society' idea is that it's essentially encouraging people who might be armed with nothing more than good intentions, to get involved with assisting other people in the running of their lives - be that supporting individuals in the community or getting involved with organising projects for specific groups such as children, the disabled or the elderly. Many of the people this help would be directed at might well be vulnerable and therein lies the danger...
There are very good reasons why in our society we have professional, legitimate organisations which run services for people who might be vulnerable. Service providers need to be trained to a high standard to understand all the complexities of the situations they might find themselves working in and also society needs to feel confident that those offering support comply with expected standards of professionalism and have been officially passed as safe to work with vulnerable people. Good intentions are simply not enough, nowhere near enough.
Without the funding and structures in place to ensure everyone working in those services has been thoroughly checked, you always run a high risk that people who pose a serious threat to service users, will slip through the net and find themselves presented with an endless stream of potential victims. And if a support worker discovers one of their colleagues is behaving inappropriately, where would they voice their concern about that? - There wouldn't presumably be a union to turn to for advice or established procedures to follow to have people struck off, because they won't have been registered with professional bodies in the first place!
There is, without doubt, a level of cynicism about the efficiency and perhaps even work ethic of various areas of the recognised support services. Although tragic and high profile cases of neglect and abuse by professionals are rare, they often reveal a culture of incompetance and nonchalance which evolves over time, when management is poor. The answer is not to ship in a load of untrained do-gooders who can offer a similar type of service (on the surface at least) for a lot less money, ideally for free. The answer has always got to be better training, better continuing assessment, better committment to the service and the people it's seeking to support.
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