Girls locked in their bedroom every night.....

Their grandma is concerned about their safety.
Keeping it all quiet appears to be dangerous.

Keeping things hushed up is not the way to go.

A bit late for that now, I'd have thought! I'm sure everyone in the area they live knows who they are.

Their safety is more important than their privacy in my opinion.

Elena Thank you for your posts! A voice of sanity in this thread.

We do not know what actually happened and it should not be speculated about.

Securing the privacy of these children is vital.

I think that the relevant local authority would have issued a denial by now if the basic fact of locking in the bedroom had been false.

Yes. I think I agree with you nightowl. I think a foster home would be a better place for them. It just doesn't sit well, does it, in your mind.

If it is true that the girls are locked in their bedroom to protect them as reported, then I can't accept that this could ever be the least awful of all the alternatives. I would find it very frightening, as an adult, to be locked inside a room, and social workers would quite rightly take action against other parents who did this for whatever reason.

I accept that we can't know the whole story (we never can) but it is something that has been reported widely enough for people to feel concerned. I do think there is some merit in discussing the principles involved and what we as a society are prepared to accept as safe living conditions for children.

It does sound to me as though the father or grandmother of the children might be prepared to look after them as an alternative, and this could certainly be enforced by the courts if they felt it was appropriate.

All excellent posts Elena.

Sorry, that last post was for nightowl.

mishap, as you said in your OP, 'Clearly we do not know all the facts of the case, so should not really comment'.

If the facts are as reported in the paper, then clearly it is terrible - everything about it, including the locking in the bedroom and the alarm and the postings on Facebook etc etc. But legally, at present it may be the only way to respond...for the moment.

Whatever..... the professionals concerned cannot confirm or deny the actual measures taken, so we just don't know what they are.

soontobe, I think it's fine to discuss things. But treating every story in the news as if it was 100 per cent true is naive, especially when there is little acknowledgement that in real life, many events and situations related to child abuse/safeguarding are complex and don't lend themselves to solutions such as 'take them into care' or 'give them to relatives'. I also think it's unhelpful to blame social workers - the social worker(s) is/are only one of several outside bodies involved. To remove children from the family home - even a terrible, neglectful, unhappy, unsafe home - is only ever done after due process.

All the reporting on the case says the girls are in a locked room with a baby alarm so they can contact their mother if they need to during the night. As Mishap says this does not appear to have bern disputed at all. Why do you think we should doubt this elena?

Are we never to discuss or question anything in that case?
We just let things happen in society?

We don't know the girls are locked in the room. How can we know anything for sure about this?

I feel quite sick and outraged at the thought of these girls being locked in their room overnight because their safety is at risk - not the physical locking of the door but that that is seen as part of an officially-sanctioned solution to enable their mother have this man in the home.

And the bit about him having to climb over her and this would wake her up, being seen as part of the protection package is surely a joke?

I truly hope that we've all been misinformed and it's really not so ludicrous.

This is a truly ghastly situation, and as I have been reading through this thread the main thing running through my mind has been how can this woman have sex with a man who is attracted to children? The thought of it makes my flesh crawl. How on earth is she going to explain this to her daughters when they get older and start asking questions? When they want to have friends over? We all know how things simmer under the surface in families, someone sometime is going to lose their temper and blurt out the whole situation. I know we dont know the whole facts, but on the face of what we think the situation is, if he loved this woman so much would he truly ask that her daughters live like this?

I do not think the fact that these girls are being locked in their bedroom at night has been disputed at all.

Assuming that this is true, I believe it to be wrong in principle, for two reasons:

Firstly it is not a safe action in the event of a fire.
Secondly it implies that the man is still regarded as a risk.

This situation is difficult. Who knows the full facts? They cannot be published because of the right to privacy.

No social worker can take a child away from the family home without a court order. So it's not social workers who are 'to blame' here, if anyone is to blame.

Foster care is not a panacea - it may have downsides and long-term after-effects. A court will have to balance these against the risk the children are facing now.

Clearly, any mother who prefers to live with a convicted paedophile needs her head testing - but this does not necessarily mean she should be prevented, legally, from doing so. There are many wicked, unthinking and crazy behaviours that are not necessarily illegal.

I can imagine that there have been many strands to this story. We can't know them. What if the paedophile in question only goes for young boys and claims girls have no attraction to him? What if he claims to be a born-again Christian? What if he says he is truly sorry and he will never do anything bad again? What if the mother believes him? On the face of it, all these claims are weak - but the court has to examine them and decide.

Locking girls in their bedroom to protect them is horrendous - but we cannot know if this is the least awful of all the alternatives, because we don't know the full story, or even if what has been reported is true.

It's no good saying 'why can't relatives take these children?' because not everyone is capable of or willing to do this, and it cannot be enforced.

Whatever the situation, it's an awful one, but no one can assume we have all the facts here, and not sufficient to have an opinion on the court decision.

My post 10.32am
Best to look at the thread in site stuff about moderation and deletion. Gransnet had replied.

More likely the teaching assistant could have been outed! That was my only worry.

nightowl - your post about SWs becoming more risk averse is interesting and true. And indeed it does suggest that some other process such as case law might be in operation here.

This "story" has not just been reported in irresponsible newspapers - there was a long discussion on BBC 4 yesterday afternoon.

I do think it is a matter for legitimate public debate - not the specifics but the general principles.

What p posted was probably illegal, Tegan. The post had to go. She and gransnet could have been sued.

Tegan - it's abut the post not about any other actions that may or may not have been carried out. Of course she won't be banned - that's a dustraction from the main point. There were far too many dentifying points in the post that were completely irrelevant - number of houses in the road, tenure of the house, clearly identifiable town they moved to.

Posted this on the wrong thread so I'll post it again.

I think social work has actually become more risk averse over the last ten or so years, particularly since the death of Peter Connelly, which is why I am even more surprised by this situation. What I became aware of about five years ago however was a shift in attitude by the courts towards risks from sex offenders. I believe there was case law that made it more difficult to secure care orders where children were living with a convicted sex offender; the view of the courts being that historical abuse against another child did not necessarily increase the risk of abuse against a child in the present . Most sw's I knew thought this was daft but it obviously affected practice and meant that sw's had to try to work with these situations and to build in protective measures. So it is possible that this apparently crazy plan is a plan enforced by the courts against the social workers' recommendations. It's not always social workers that get things wrong, but of course they can't discuss individual cases due to confidentiality. Just a thought.