Honestly, would you be a social worker?

Not many, a friend at the council told me. Concerned citizens were hardly rushing to volunteer. About 15 per cent of social workers' vacancies were unfilled. As for the rest, foreigners had taken many of the posts. Like cleaning offices and driving buses, protecting children from abuse was a task Londoners were happy to contract out.

Yet now that Sharon Shoesmith, head of children's services at Haringey, has been sacked, I cannot pretend she is a victim of such hypocrisy.

Double standards do indeed abound in our attitude towards social work. I, like many other journalists, have listened to heart-breaking stories from mothers who have had their children taken from them by the council. I have written my share of furious articles about the secrecy of the family courts, which prevents MPs and reporters campaigning to overturn alleged miscarriages of justice. It's easy to claim that the press damns social workers if they take children and damns them if they leave the kids with their mothers.

But much though I would like to defend Haringey, I'm afraid that such pleas on behalf of its social workers won't wash. Yesterday's report was devastating, uncovering systemic failures as well as key failings by individuals: Children's Secretary Ed Balls was unsparing in his criticism.

Its conclusions are backed by a recent statistical analysis of how the young suffer in Britain from the NSPCC. It's depressing reading, although it concludes that social services do not even know about half of the victims of sexual and physical abuse and so cannot be blamed for their deaths.

But social services knew all about Baby P and had seen him dozens of times. If responsibility is to mean anything in the public sector, then the preventable death of a child under the supervision of social services has to result in the sacking of the social workers involved.

I say this with reluctance because I won't be applying to fill the vacancies. Will you?