Mark Smith

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Mark Smith,[1] MA (Hons) CQSW, M.Ed, PhD, Cert Child Protection Studies, Cert Social Services Leadership, FHEA, (since 2017) is Professor of Social Work at the University of Dundee, in Perth, Scotland. Before his academic career, Smith was a practitioner and manager in residential child care settings for 20 years. He developed and taught the Masters in Residential Child Care at Strathclyde University/Glasgow School of Social Work and, in 2005, he moved to the University of Edinburgh as lecturer. Subsequently, he became a senior lecturer in social work and served as head of social work there from 2013 - 2017. He has a broad range of research and writing interests, with some publications likely to interest MAPs, AAMs and their allies due to their coverage on topics such as historical abuse in residential child care. These include critical articles and an edited volume on moral panics and UK child protection policy, as well as criticism of the myth of inevitable trauma[2] from sexual contact involving an age gap, and recognizing the risk of iatrogenic/secondary harm through the intervention of professional services.

In 2008, Smith published the article 'Historical abuse in residential child care: an alternative view'.[3] More recently, he has co-authored a critique of the trauma narrative in 'Trauma: an ideology in search of evidence' (2021),[4] and the evidence-based review article 'Trauma-informed approaches: a critical overview of what they offer to social work and social care" (2023).[5]

Media Coverage

Smith has received and responded to criticism of his scholarship in mainstream media.[6][7] Reportedly (Ibid), Smith accused the Sunday Herald of a "witch hunt based on guilt by association or, more worryingly, guilt where there is not even association". He was criticized in particular for his article "Criminalising everyday care" (The Justice Gap, 2017),[8] and for his "comments defending Brother Benedict [Michael Murphy,[9] in which] Smith confirmed they worked together and said the case inspired him to become an academic." The same article states that, "When asked to justify his defence, Smith said:

The device in question generated static electricity. It was similar to the Van de Graaff generators used in science labs across the country – its impact was no greater. I know this from personal experience and [in the trial] several former pupils testified to this effect.

It is legitimate to assert from personal experience that this was not abuse.

He added: "In terms of the [Brother Benedict] case I have only ever questioned the interpretation of allegations surrounding the Van de Graaff generator and whether the minor electric shock produced by a hand-cranked generator constituted abuse."

I question the criminal justice system's responses to credulously believing every claim. I am not alone in this as recent events in England testify, for example ... the 'Nick' case [see our page on Operation Midland and the professional victim fraudster/liar Carl Beech a.k.a. 'Nick' - Editors], in which allegations against prominent figures have been shown to be wholly without substance. (Ibid).

Jimmy Savile and Academic Freedom

With the Oxford Prof. Ros Burnett, Smith published "The origins of the Jimmy Savile scandal" (2018).[10] The article uses "interview material from former pupils and staff members from Duncroft School, from whence initial allegations against Savile emanate," and presents "a very different picture [...] to that presented in media accounts," a "questioning account of the origins of the scandal" which "may be claimed or used to cast doubt on accounts of abuse".

With Jane Fenton, Smith co-authored a contribution ('You Can’t Say That!': Critical Thinking, Identity Politics, and the Social Work Academy')[11] to a special issue of the academic journal Societies.[12] The special issue was edited by Else-Marie Buch Leander and Heather Piper, the latter of whom has co-authored a book on false allegations of teacher-student sex-contact in schools[13] alongside Pat Sikes, a university lecturer who has spoken out about her mutually willing, positively experienced, and (at the time) socially accepted sexual relationship with an older male teacher when she was an adolescent.

Our page on Dr. Richard Yuill mentions Smith and his co-authors Vivien E. Cree and Gary Clapton, at the university of Edinburgh.[14]

External links and further reading

References

  1. ↑ Profile on dundee.ac.uk
  2. ↑ Smith, M., Monteux, S., & Cameron, C. (2021). 'Trauma: An Ideology in Search of Evidence and its Implicationsfor the Social in Social Welfare'. Scottish Affairs, 30(4), 472-492.
  3. ↑ Historical abuse in residential child care: an alternative view, in Practice – Social Work in Action, Vol. 20 No. 1 (March 2008). <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09503150701872265>
  4. ↑ See above citation.
  5. ↑ Smith, M., & Monteux, S. (2023). Trauma-informed approaches: a critical overview of what they offer to social work and social care. Insights, 1-24.
  6. ↑ Online PDF of Newspaper stories criticizing Mark Smith.
  7. ↑ Peter Swindon, 'I don’t defend child abusers. I question the criminal justice system's responses to believing every claim', The Herald Scotland (4th March, 2018).
  8. ↑ Smith, M. 'Criminalising everyday care (The Justice Gap, 13th July, 2017).
  9. ↑ Murphy was originally convicted in 2003 for allegedly force feeding boys vomit, whipping them with knotted boot laces and administering electric shocks, but released on appeal in 2003 after nine days of incarceration. He was later imprisoned for a year in 2008, the year in which Smith's article (Historical abuse in residential child care: an alternative view) commenting on the case was published. In the article, Smith said he "watched a former colleague, a 74-year-old religious Brother whose entire life had been spent helping others, jailed. His crime was to have used an electricity-generating device as an instrument of torture to punish boys ... of course had the Brother involved actually electrocuted kids then a jail sentence would seem only appropriate. But he hadn't." ... Smith said the device, which he described as “Brother Ben’s machine”, worked when boys held two rods while the handle was turned to generate a “charge” which he described as “mild”. Smith said: "When practices such as this are construed and indeed prosecuted as torture or punishment there is something very odd going on." ... Murphy was jailed again in June 2016 for the alleged 'torturing' and 'sexually abusing' of boys at St Joseph's List D School, in Tranent, in the 1970s.
  10. ↑ Smith, M. and Burnett, R. (2018), "The origins of the Jimmy Savile scandal", International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Vol. 38 No. 1/2, pp. 26-40. <https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSSP-03-2017-0029>.
  11. ↑ Jane Fenton and Mark Smith, 'You Can’t Say That!': Critical Thinking, Identity Politics, and the Social Work Academy', in Societies, 9: 71 (2019).
  12. ↑ Challenging Academia: A Critical Space for Controversial Social Issues, ed. by Heather Piper and Else-Marie Buch Leander (2021). Special issue of Societies.
  13. ↑ See Piper and Sikes, "Researching Sex and Lies in the Classroom: Allegations of Sexual Misconduct in Schools" (2009, Routledge); (For a review, see Steven Angelides (2011). Review of Sex and Lies by Angelides (2011). Sci-hub link).
  14. ↑ Yuill and these authors have been attacked in print by the same professional Anti, Dr. David Pilgrim. Cree, Clapton and Smith had applied moral panic theory to analyze UK child protection discourses in articles such as Moral panics and social work: Towards a sceptical view of UK child protection (2013), and edited the volume Revisiting Moral Panics (2015) which Pilgrim took issue with. In the authors' words, Pilgrm decided "to use our book, Revisiting moral panics (Cree et al, 2015), to construct a straw man, which needs to be knocked down to preserve his own particular view of child sexual abuse." (See Cree et al p223). Pilgrim responded, making "a brief concession [...] to a couple of points".( See Cree et al p351).
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