Mark Smith

Mark Smith, 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 from sexual contact involving an age gap, and recognizing the risk of iatrogenic/secondary harm through the intervention of professional services.

Smith has received and responded to criticism of his scholarship in mainstream media. 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), and for his "comments defending Brother Benedict [Michael Murphy, 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).

With the Oxford Prof. Ros Burnett, Smith published "The origins of the Jimmy Savile scandal" (2018). 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".

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

With Jane Fenton, Smith co-author a contribution ('You Can’t Say That!': Critical Thinking, Identity Politics, and the Social Work Academy') to a special issue of the academic journal Societies. 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 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.

External links and further reading

• Smith, M. (2010). Victim Narratives of Historical Abuse in Residential Child Care: Do We Really Know What We Think We Know? Qualitative Social Work, 9(3), 303-320.
• Smith, M. (2016). 'Editorial.' [Joint Special Issue, Love in Professional Practice] Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care, 15(3) and International Journal of Social Pedagogy, 5(1), pp. 1-5.
• Smith, M. (2017). A cautionary tale regarding 'believing' allegations of historical child abuse. Ethics and Social Welfare, 11(1), 62–76.
• Smith, M. (2022). Beyond a Single Story: Peripheral Histories of Boys Brought Up in a Residential School. Ethics and Social Welfare, 16(3), 290–305.