Hamzah Kahn

I know there is nothing to say really, but we shouldn't overlook him.

Isn't that the most heart-breaking picture of a child? I can't believe another one. Nothing seems to change. I didn't hear mention of any man, somehow it seems worse, just a mother letting her child starve. Sheesh. Credit to the official who didn't give up and kept knocking on the door.

I wanted to cry when I heard it on the news. Poor wee mite. and

Apparently she was separated from Hamzah`s father, and he lived elsewhere. The poor little soul, it`s heartbreaking.

No words, and no emoticons either.

I've been following this in the news, and agree with everyone, it's just heartbreaking.
It seems Hamzah's father was arrested after assaulting the baby's mother. During his police interview Mr K criticised his baby's mother. His comments indicated there were concerns for the baby's welfare. Reports suggest the police visited, and there observations didn't support Mr K's comments. There will no doubt be a part 8 review - again, and the same platitudes will be spoken.
The impact of domestic violence, alcohol/drug abuse and mental health problems is at the heart of child abuse/neglect. This is not new information. It's time this country invested in proper training and supervision of staff involved in this key area of work. It would need financial investment - but are we to believe that children aren't our most important investment.

I've been following this in the news, and agree with everyone, it's just heartbreaking.
It seems Hamzah's father was arrested after assaulting the baby's mother. During his police interview Mr K criticised his baby's mother. His comments indicated there were concerns for the baby's welfare. Reports suggest the police visited, and there observations didn't support Mr K's comments. There will no doubt be a part 8 review - again, and the same platitudes will be spoken.
The impact of domestic violence, alcohol/drug abuse and mental health problems is at the heart of child abuse/neglect. This is not new information. It's time this country invested in proper training and supervision of staff involved in this key area of work. It would need financial investment - but are we to believe that children aren't our most important investment.

sorry, don't know why this appears twice..

Don't they have health visitors at all these days?

This mother must have been a terrible mental state. Depression surely?

He's just one (sadly beyond belief) of many that never even hit the news.

The news reports say the mother was a heavy drinker, I've seen the word alcoholic used. There are still health visitors - but it seems their case loads are huge. Even so - this is another of those 'how could this happen' in the 21st century in a wealthy country. So far as I can pick up, this mum wasn't transitory, so the health visitor would have been the obvious person to follow up failed appointments for immunisations, clinic checks etc. I don't understand how the police officers who visited after the father's arrest for assaulting the mum didn't raise concerns about this child's welfare. I fear the reality is there is so much domestic abuse in the context of alcohol/drug abuse, that the potential seriousness of this situation didn't register with the police team. It should have -

I can remember, when I talked to other young mums, that we used to complain about visits from the health visitor. We regarded them as nosey parkers. Looking back, I can see how good a thing those routine visits were.

I loved my health visitor coming. She was incredibly supportive and knew lots of good tips for things like feeding problems. However, I can imagine how threatening the HV's arrival would be for someone trying to conceal abuse and neglect. I don't know where I stand on this particular case. I can empathise with a mother who is suffering serious depression and has lost all sense of what to do with a child who isn't thriving, but struggle with why she didn't get help in moments of lucidity and realisation of what had happened to her child.

This is a more complex situation than just a mother letting her child starve!

No one in a healthy state of mind would make the choices this mother made and knowingly put her child at risk.

The heartbreaking part is that people were aware this woman was struggling and they did nothing!

It is complex. It's so easy to put a woman in a category of mad, bad or sad, and forget that women also have responsibility, and people with mental health and substance abuse problems have capacity to protect children, with some, little, or no support. I have worked with female offenders who have clearly disposed of their children wihout a backwards glance and others who have seen the results of their failure to protect, and taken their own lives because they can't live with what they did. Others stumble along, never learning or changing, being 'high maintenance' parents who will never be able to keep a child safe, nourished, loved and educated. I'm still wondering about this mother, who has been criticised by others for being a risk to her child, yet he wasn't protected. Yet another case of the people who could have helped assuming someone else was doing the necessary, and not checking.

I think it is a shame that there is not more argument for upping HV numbers and giving them a greater role in protecting more vulnerable children.
The school nurse and regular checks on child development are a thing of the past..lost to various 'cuts' over the years and thought of as not very important or valuable as a result.

I am afraid I believe that when the social and health care budgets are cut so much the results will be more tragic situations. I agree parents ought to be the child's first protectors but a huge variety of health /social situations prevent this happening for a significant minority of families..across all socia-economic backgrounds.

What interests me is how we are disposed to blame men - fathers and stepfathers - when children die at their hands and yet be more sympathetic towards mothers, looking for reasons of illness or mental disorder to explain their actions, or inactions. As when says, mothers have responsibilities too and it would have taken a long time for this poor child to starve to death. His mother somehow functioned during that time, we know she went out and she clearly fed herself adequately. I agree that the child was failed by all the agencies that should have protected him but he was also let down by those close to him. As for the older son who was also involved and facing charges, what on earth was he thinking of?

Another tragic case that beggars belief.

Yes, we can't have it all ways. Women have to take responsibility for crimes against children. This woman might have been getting all her calories from alcohol, and maybe not feeding herself, either, but she hasn't lost her life, so something was different about how she treated this little boy who she called a fussy eater. This wasn't a frenzied killing, smothering in despair, or an attempt to kill herself along with her child, as so many tragic post-partum psychosis cases have been described. It was a long, slow decline of a child who not only failed to thrive but was not helped to recover. I'm trying to stay open-minded because there may yet be a constructive explanation, but it's hard .

It will be interesting to hear what the judgement turns out to be. I would think they will have carried out thorough examinations of her mental state over the past few years. I would hope she is given an appropriate prison sentence, with treatment.

Yes, it is so hard to understand

Fifteen years.

I wonder if that judge knows anything at all about mental illness.

perhaps a bit more compassion in the judge's comments?

Unlike most of you I have physically been unable to follow this story as it reduces me to tears. Am I ducking out of my moral responsibilty? Maybe. But it is the most unbelievable tragedy or at least it would be if it weren't true. We all say How could this happen? But it has happened again and someone somewhere (other than the mother) must bear some of the collective responsibility for this poor child's death.

I think there should be a system of compulsory checks on all children, perhaps every six months. It would at least keep some of them on the radar. My daughter tells me that when she takes her baby to be weighed the mothers just do it themselves and write the weight down so no one really knows what is happening with the children. We worked out that, apart from a couple of early visits from the health visitor, no one has actually checked on him since he was born nine months ago. The health visitor who came told my daughter that the only mothers she saw were the ones she didn't need to. The others quietly disappeared and ignored attempts to see them.

A 'friend' of this mother was speaking on the radio this morning. She said there was a lot of love in that household - how on earth could a friend not have realised that something was terribly wrong? She blamed the authorities, but shouldn't she have taken some responsibilty herself?