RIP Baby Star Hobson

Two wrong dont make a right MissAdventure although I agree with many of your posts on this thread.

They never do make a right.

No they don’t.

Just as a bit of diversion Germaine Greer once said that the answer to contraception was to give every male a vasectomy, before the op he would freeze sperm, when a child was wanted the sperm would be used. Now rather than sterilize mothers I'd go for that.

The thing to remember, whatever approach we take, is that a little baby is dead due to abuse, and that shouldn't have happened.
Of course no system is failsafe, no one person can be held accountable (apart from the bitches who did it) but for it to culminate in a death, caused by multiple outrages over a sustained time is not acceptable.

I work with children with additional needs, and it is these children I think about as well. When people are talking about sterilisation and using the word 'stupid' they are also talking about sterilisation of people with learning disabilities. Let's not pretend any other.
How do we balance this. I think the horrific answer is that we cant.

There are plenty of psychopaths with high IQs, actually.

Yes of course but people in this thread arent saying let's sterilise the highly intelligent people.

Typically.
As is usual.

Up to two children die at the hands of parents/carers each week as a result of non accidental injuries or neglect. That figure seems to have been unchanged over many years.

The numbers of children in care increased by 50% during the pandemic.

I hope the awful reports of the suffering of Arthur and Star result result in an overhaul in all the agencies involved with children. The wheel doesn’t need to be re-invented. Each inquiry consistently identifies similar issues.

They do indeed identify similar issues.

The critical thing is to co-ordinate concerns - so often there are individuals who have a concern, but it seems to small to report. But there might be 10 others with similar "small" concerns and if you put them all together a picture emerges that is very serious. The systems in place recognise this and try to make this happen, but somehow it does not.

Money and resources are also an issue. Social workers have caseloads that are of ridiculous proportions and do not make it possible to do the job thoroughly. And so often the parents have warning of a visit and brush up their act for the time the SW is in the house.

It is like the police ringing up and saying "Hello - just wanted to let you know that we will be doing a drugs bust on your house at 2 o'clock."

But finding drugs seems to carry a higher priority than finding child abusers.

Prevention is also key - we need Sure Start and family centres back.

Thanks Luckygirl. Absolutely with you on Sure Start and family centres. My poor former mill town had a family centre which was a centre of excellence. It closed because cuts meant the council was unable to meet statutory duties, much less support the centre and the excellent work done by charities.

nightowl

So many generalisations here. I can assure you that middle class people abuse their children too, but they are far better at hiding it and keeping the authorities at bay than the poor and feckless. What horrible judgmental attitudes some people have.

Nightowl more often than not and many is not tarring them all with the same brush. You choose to call my 17 year experience of working on a busy Maternity unit with babies on pre-birth At Risk registers as a horrible judgmental attitude. I am neither horrible or judgmental. I was simply saying how it was where I worked.

It seems SW's nowadays are more keen to take children away who are okay - am in close contact with a family where the Grandmother wanted to look after her sons children and tried very hard, but couldn't manage fully because she had health issues and was distraught when all she needed was some help with chores etc - but no, they were put into a Foster Home, where actually they were happy, and Grandma was able to visit etc and it worked, very well - the lad started to do very well in school and the little girl was happy and they called the foster carers Mummy and Daddy ... THEN some SW decided she was going to put them up for adoption! Some la di dah woman who decided to suddenly want children, picked them out of a book and they went to her. No contact with Granny at all. The boy was absolutely devastated and HATED it, although the little girl was generally ok but wanted to see her Granny and her aunts and uncles and cousins .... the adoption trial period was then up and the woman decided she wanted the girl but not the boy, and the Judge allowed it to happen! They were split! She wasn't allowed to see any of her other family but was allowed to Facetime her brother once a week, which upset her every time as she kept asking where her Mummy was etc and wanted to be back in her bedroom where he was ..... I don't know what has happened since, except the lad is fortunately back with who he called Mummy and is again doing well, and I think they were in the process of adopting him .... I believe that SW was once heard to say - if it's the last thing I do before I leave I will get those 2 adopted .... she literally ripped that little boy's heart out, and not once was he asked what he wanted to do, and he was quite capable of telling them. Just dreadful ....

21 years ago myself and a friend contacted Social Services and Police with our concerns that one of my grandaughters was possibly being groomed by her step father. Family Court had forced my daughter to give stepfather access. We couldn't stop that.
The Social services response was to accuse us of making a malicious complaint because we are biased.
Yes we love and care for DGD
Nothing was followed up. no one was talked to.

I have had dealings with Social Workers from being a severely disabled person.
Some Social Workers are lovely but certainly not all.
In fact I was surprised at how many are vindicative and how many are really stupid.......in emotional terms.
They cannot read people and I think they are usually the biased person.

While cutbacks have created lots of hardships it doesn't excuse the way many Social Workers are simply not a good fit for their job.
In reading about Arthur and now Star, I don't see how many times can SW's be excused for not listening to relatives and friends......especially grandparents..
We often do know better than "professional"

I would like to see the way assessments are made so that family and friends accounts are very much taken in to account.
These two recent cases prove the value of grandparents. IMO

If you vote for a reduction in taxes and a cutback of services,

I believe it was Trisher that said this.

Sarnia. You aren’t being judgemental anymore than I am. You are speaking from your experience as am I. There’s far too much of this dismissing people’s views. I know a friend’s daughter who’s in sw and when she was studying for her degree she told us she was taught that the ‘lower classes’ don’t have the same standards and not to judge. It’s outrageous. Most of the so called lower classes love and care for their children just as much as anyone else. To casually dismiss a neglected, dirty child because ‘they’ have different standards is not only camouflaged snobbery but displays a mind boggling lack of understanding.

tickingbird

^If you vote for a reduction in taxes and a cutback of services,^

I believe it was Trisher that said this.

Yes, she did; but that is not the same thing at all as saying that everyone that voted Tory did so because they weren’t willing to pay the taxes required to fund social services

People will have voted Tory for all sorts of reasons, not all of which will have been about taxation levels, but it is absolutely true that a reduction in services is a result of their vote, and they should, IMO, take some responsibility for that. Low taxation is an important part of Tory philosophy.

It may be that they think that the things they voted for are important enough to weigh against the cuts, and that's their right. Whichever party you vote for, choices have to be made, and sometimes it's a case of who is least bad. But it's disingenuous to pretend that when someone votes Tory they don't understand that they are not voting for a government that prioritises social care.

I’m aware of that Doodledog but she basically said this is because people voted Tory.

Yet again, it’s become political.

Feel free to explain why these failings in child protection were happening under a Labour government.

tickingbird

I’m aware of that Doodledog but she basically said this is because people voted Tory.

Yet again, it’s become political.

Feel free to explain why these failings in child protection were happening under a Labour government.

I explained that and showed how it worked tickingbird.(on a different thread) Basically when Blair came to power the impact of the Thatcher years was showing in every aspect of childcare - lack of services, inadequate buildings understaffing -just as it is now. The Labour government after consultation implemented the Every Child Matters initiative which was set to change and improve services particularly for the most vulnerable. It was scrapped in 2010. None of the objectives were ever met and looking at them now almost breaks my heart. We had such hopes and yes this Tory government and the coalition which preceded it were entirely responsible for destroying what would have been the best hope for these children. So don't expect me to say everything is fine it isn't. There may have been failings under a Labour government but they took steps to change things, all the Tories have done is abandon those steps. You may not have realised what you were voting for when you chose the Tories, but as I say either you wanted a small state, or you didn't understand, and ignorance is no defence.

Except when it's applied to social workers, presumably?
The ones who work and are paid to safeguard, but dismiss safeguarding concerns as malicious.

What a shameful to say. A beautiful innocent baby died a horrible death, but it’s not the perpetrators to blame it’s the government. Little Star, was let down by many, but her own mother did it.

The whole thing is shameful.
Multiple failures across the board.

Yet again, numerous reports to social services and nothing done. I was listening to a spokesman for social services, speaking on BBC regarding little Arthur. What he seemed to be saying was that social workers are not allowed to use their own instincts or common sense any more. They are required to follow procedure and tick box responses, so if a particular case or scenario doesn’t fit the model, it’s anybody’s guess how they will respond. He said qualified and experienced social workers are leaving child services in droves because their hands are effectively tied by bureaucracy . Time for a root and branch overhaul and for some common sense to be reintroduced instead of this insane obsession with box ticking, meeting targets and the seemingly endless need to justify your every move.

Time for a root and branch overhaul and for some common sense to be reintroduced instead of this insane obsession with box ticking, meeting targets and the seemingly endless need to justify your every move

Absolutely ….same in education and probably health care too !