For a number of years, I showed Ken Loach's movie ‘Ladybird, Ladybird’ to my graduate classes. The movie deals with the issue of social injustice in the child protection system, telling the story of Maggie, a single mother of four children, who was sexually abused as a young girl and grew up in institutions. As an adult, she maintained fleeting relationships with various men, four of whom are the fathers of her children. One evening, she goes out to sing in a local bar and leaves her children asleep, locking the door behind her in order to prevent a break-in by violent or drunken men. During the evening, a fire breaks out in the apartment, which causes serious injury to one of the children. After a number of additional incidents, including violent behaviour by her partner, social workers remove the children from her care. Maggie fights to get them back but does not succeed. At this point, she meets Jorge, an illegal immigrant from Paraguay. With him, for the first time in her life, she establishes a relationship based on love, care and mutual respect. Both Maggie and Jorge try to avoid any contact with social services. She is wary of the long arm of the child protection workers and he is concerned about being deported. However, when Maggie becomes pregnant, the social workers locate her. They interpret her suspicious attitude towards them as a lack of awareness regarding her parenting problems and, in due course, remove the infant from the parents’ care. Not much later, this series of events occurs again. The movie is heartbreaking.

Every year, the students were shocked by the movie, both by Maggie's story and by how they saw themselves reflected in the social workers’ characters. And every year, they argued with me, claiming that the movie is one-sided in favour of Maggie and does not accurately describe the child protection system. One year, two students, who were Social Workers to the Youth Law – specialist social workers who have a legal role in criminal investigations of maltreatment and represent the child's interest in juvenile courts (Gottfried and Ben-Arieh, 2019) – were especially resolute, arguing that the movie was part of a public campaign to slander social workers by portraying them as ‘child kidnappers’. They said that it was a terrible movie and that the situation in Israel is totally different.