IT WAS ARGUED in Chapter 1 that a heavy silence within attends the human service shadow world of mishaps and misdeeds. This book has attempted to displace the silence through compilation and analysis of a small body of behaviours and events in which a failure of a duty of care (or some other legal obligation) is alleged, and comes to the attention of the law and quasi-legal bodies.

The activities underpinning these legal actions or investigations have ranged from criminal, intentional and self-serving, through to inadvertent minor slips in everyday human services functioning. Some actors appear to have been unlucky, or from another perspective held to account, for behaviour that was either the norm in that arena or would not normally be detected or complained about. Some actors have engaged in activities where disaster was predictable. Some have found themselves subject to legal attention for a single event, others for involvement in a series of events. Individual workers have featured in the criminal law actions, as would be expected, in some statutory breach cases and in all industrial actions. Organisations and public authorities have figured largely in industrial, discrimination, occupational health and safety, information management, administrative and civil actions, and in numerous inquires into organisational failures. System representatives, most commonly state ministers, have appeared in administrative actions, occasionally in civil matters and also in public inquiries.

The quadrants in Figure 2.2 have been variously represented. In relation to acts, examples of misfeasance are more numerous than those of malfeasance.