Baby P witch hunt

Lucy Letby is 100% guilty and even if she wasn't I'm not sure who you believe the "villain/s" to be? Not everything is a conspiracy but for some reason people are in huge denial about her. As for Kate and Gerry McCann, the people responsible are almost always the parents so obviously suspicion fell on them. I still don't know what I believe with that case but they are very strange people.

Stepfather.

Have you looked at the sentencing guidelines? Plus P didn’t live with his father. The boyfriend was convicted - see attached.

Baby Ps parents deliberately murdered him. They lied repeatedly about their intentions. There is nobody that could have stopped them IMO. I feel very badly for people with that kind of responsibility pushed on them. No social worker ever wants to work on a case like that. GP's are trying to heal people. 5 years is an absolute joke, the justice system in this country is far to lenient when dealing with family crimes.

@croydon15 They are not all light sentences by any means. The sentencing guidelines must take various factors into account. In this case the sentence was indefinite - minimum 5 years. So the mum had to keep asking the parole board. Her release, twice, was because she met the conditions set by the parole board. This is not a retrial of the first offence. She didn’t reoffend as far as I’m aware. She didn’t meet her licence conditions so was recalled to prison.

Now I believe there are 4 categories of culpability in a crime like this and then 3 ranges of sentences. It seems she was not sent to prison for murder but that’s surely a CPS decision. Keir Starmer was head of CPS. The only logical reason they didn’t go for murder was lack of evidence. Others might know more from the legal side.

As I recall, one of the social workers involved tried to raise concerns with her manager, who was an evangelical Christian and only wanted to talk about God. The former was hung out to dry by her employers. I read the book about the case by the then Haringey Head of Children’s Services (Sharon Shoesmith) who was completely thrown to the wolves by the government keen to find a scapegoat.

I do wonder who are the kind of people who write death threats for people they don’t know. Probably the same kind of people who write begging letters to lottery winners.

What l don't understand is the light sentences in the majority of children death by parents, do the judges think that torturing a child to death justify just a few years in jail, in the case of Emma Tustin she is being protected in jail. Is that right definitely not in my eyes.
Life should mean life for anyone torturing/killing a child.

This is not entirely true and hasn't been for some time. There remain some difficulties but overall the IT systems are better and more joined up

@NowImNotDoingIt The serious case review revealed shortcomings of the services or we would not know about them. It was not just a focus on the individuals although the media did.

Obviously a mum is held to a greater standard than a father. She alone should have prevented this? Was she capable of that? As far as I’m aware, the sentence for his mother was not called in as being unduly lenient. This presumably means guidelines were followed. However lenient it might seem. Although there were recall clauses so she was released on licence it appears.

@the7Vabo couldn’t agree more re the doctor. That’s democracy for you.

I’m in awe of social workers - who knows how many lives they save daily. We should know, shouldn’t we. Doesn’t mean they’re all competent and/or supported tho.

Isn’t the ‘mother’ back in prison? As of last month she broke licence and she’ll have trouble getting out now.

A propos of nothing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen pix of an uglier human being. So unusual to look as wrong outside as you are inside.

Trouble is, these systems only exist to stop this sort of killing.

Most of the time they do - but when they don’t, you can just wave a murder away.

Some people can’t do some jobs. Being fired isn’t a terminal illness. Nothing to stop everyone who was let go doing something else.

The thing is, by focusing on an individual and their shortcomings, there's no hope in hell to actually fix a broken and fucked up system/procedures.

That doesn't mean individuals are blameless or we should ignore their actions, but there's a much bigger picture here.

@Pat888 We cannot blame all shortcomings on underfunding. People do have professional responsibility as well. When they see a dc, or indeed don’t, it’s not ok to do nothing. Not ask questions. Not have doubts. I don’t condone hounding anyone but there were individual shortcomings. We don’t accept nhs negligence. and the NHS paid out £2.8 billion in negligence claims last year. Had baby P been an adult, he would have had compensation.

Having gone through a serious case review as a teacher I would sadly say that the lessons learned from these cases from all agencies seems to be to make sure that the blame is laid elsewhere. It is the worst feeling to think 'what did I miss?' even when you know the child has never disclosed anything about what they were going through and there was nothing you could have reported.

It honestly makes you feel sick when you are being questioned after hearing horrific things that have happened and having to think of every word you are saying because it will be recorded and used against you if possible. There has to be a safer better way of doing this so children are kept safe.

In my experience it is the constant changing of people involved with the child and family including all agencies that leads to things being missed. If you imagine what it is like each time you have to speak to a locum GP and try to go through your medical history to explain what is happening so they can give a knowledgable diagnosis. This is what has to happen each time a new agency person is put onto a child or families case.

Why were no notes available at the clinic?

I can answer this- hospital wards and GPs surgeries do not have an integrated system of information. I have been treated in a hospital where they didn't even have access to each other's notes in different departments, let alone different hospitals (top London hospital). I also attend two hospitals only an hour away from each other, but each one has their own IT system and when I turned up at the second one, they had no notes from the first.

GPs use about four or five different off the shelf system, they are not integrated with each other or the local hospital.

The local hospital releases results on one system (NHS app), the GP on another system.

They still send letters to each other, by post, to communicate.

Add then into notes from safeguarding, social services, and the whole thing is a mess of non-information,

Any doctor is often dependent on the person in front of them telling them their medical history, it's a recipe for disaster, including for safeguarding where people have something to hide.

So frightening.

Yes but then what? We blame the parent(s) . We put them on trial. We convict them. Then what? You can't stop people like this from existing or having children. So what do we do in order for the least number of children to suffer and die?

In all of these cases the first thing I hear is where were social services. This is usually from extended family members, I understand it must be very hard to realise you are related to a monster but I always think, what about the parents that harmed this child. What about extended family, did they not see the signs themselves, surely they would be better placed to notice changes.
But the blame always seems to land of external agencies. Personally I blame the scum bags that harmed the child they had responsibilities for.

But we know there are evil people, there always will be, it's not that they're not being blamed, just that it's an indisputable fact. That's the reason we have social services. It's their job and they failed. Medical services are another line of protection, they failed. We do need to understand why they failed but for this case it won't change the catastrophic outcome of their failure. What I do think is wrong, is that individuals took the blame for institutional failure. We prefer to point at a bogeyman rather than accept that we're not willing to pay more for better services. Baby P paid the price for 'efficiencies' - no-one wants to admit that whole looking at a photo of a cute little boy - so let's blame A doctor, A social worker etc. We need a face and a name otherwise we might have to look at the kind of society we've created.

The point is it’s never the systems fault. Failing and overworked/underesourced systems caused this, but what always happens is that an individual or individuals are dragged through the mud and blamed, and then nothing changes. Its disgusting.