Baby P witch hunt

yanbu

you will notice in stories like this, social services are absolutely vilified while the parents aren't judged as harshly. Even if the social worker was under massive pressure with 40 families to monitor with no way of knowing which needle in the haystack would turn out to be a horrible ending. It's always 'why didn't the authorities stop this!!' not 'why did the parents do this!?'

additionally, people flip to the opposite side in a jiffy. 'Nosy social workers up in everyone's business getting bonuses for removing kids from loving families!!1'!1'

I completely agree x

Lucy Letby has been found guilty of 7 counts of murder. She is being held accountable and she should be.
The McCanns are an odd lot. Most parents would not leave 3 unattended children in an unlocked apartment whilst they had dinner 80 yds away - at least none of my family would. I never understood why they did not have a babysitter, either. But most of the fault lay with the resort, which had hidden some child molesting earlier in the year, and the police who focused on the McCanns rather than looking for other (rather obvious) reasons for the disappearance.
The parents of baby P can only be described as wicked. It's unfashionable to brand people in such a way, nowadays, but they were. The social workers and the doctor made mistakes, but they were overwhelmed. And the parents did it - they are the ones respnsible.

You could say that about every little task though. There comes a point where things get rushed. Again, the government has blood on their hands.

This, every single time. They should never have left 3 kids under 5 ALONE while they went for dinner with friends. It was horrendous what happened to them but this would have been prevented by them looking after their kids properly. If they had been of lower socio-economic status they would have been absolutely vilified.

How much more work would it have taken to ascertain whether the boyfriend was living in the home or spending a significant amount of time there? It's one of the biggest flags for child abuse, and it was ignored.

There comes a point where you have to ask questions about intelligence and commitment and basic training.

I think we are still looking for someone to blame when it was understaffing and underfunding. I remember things changing when it was decided it was best to keep DCs with their family and provide support.
When someone goes to A/E now and they are left lying on a trolley, can’t get a hospital bed we don’t start a hunt for the consultant or nurse who is ultimately to blame for inadequate treatment. We accept its underfunding.
I don’t see that this is any different.

My LA was found to be inadequate for Children’s Services around 10 years ago. Not London. The inspection highlighted poor practice and management by senior SS staff. It highlighted the police could not be bothered to attend meetings about DC who were considered to be at risk. It obviously highlighted a lot more including members thinking the service spent to much! This was after baby P and the workload was huge.

I think it’s not individual social workers who determine workload and who needs more or less intervention, it’s senior leadership who should have a handle on this. They are paid to manage and members are expected to take needs seriously. Most ordinary people have no idea how bad it is. There’s no doubt it was an unattractive career after baby P.

And Laming and Hodge got off scot free in this 'documentary' did they?

A lot of people also forget that removal isn't the happy ending they think it is.

There is a severe lack of foster carers, adoptive parents and adequate placements. Some placements can be as abusive or even worse than the homes the children left. Some are simply not suitable to deal with traumatised, difficult, angry , hurting children. Then you have the trauma of separation on the children. You have no idea how many of these kids desperately live their parent and want to be back home. How much they hate and resent everyone involved for taking them away. How many long to be back. How many do go back once they're old enough to choose/run away etc. The older a child is, the harder and more traumatic it is on them.

You remove a child , a multi agency panel decides the child should be returned home because of reasons. How is that your fault as a social worker?

You call SS and the police. The police say they won't do anything and leave it with the social worker. How is that your fault as a doctor/ SW?

When you read the list of injuries that boy sustained, someone, somewhere, should have noticed and done something.

The only people that have the power to actually do something right away are the police. They're the only ones that can remove a child , and that's only for 72 hours.

Social workers need a court order to remove a child.

Peter was removed once , a panel (including the police) decided he could be returned home. That's despite the investigation being on going. His social worker was changed.

That's where it all went wrong. That baby should never have returned home, and as soon as another suspicious incident happened he should have been removed again. Or the third , or fourth. The police were informed about one of them , but decided to not take any action and leave it with the social worker instead.

They were all to blame an important part of their job is child protection and they didn’t protect the child.

The prison sentence is a complete injustice too.

So a good question is, let’s say you are police, or SS, or a GP for example, and you have a caseload of 100 a month, but you can get through only 50 effectively when done properly, what do you do? Do 100 jobs half-arsed or do 50 jobs well and leave the other 50 to pile up onto an already large pile? Either way, people will die.

These services are grossly underfunded. I don’t think people realise quite how bad it is. If you have a system where the majority are seen and helped in good time, then you cut the staff by a large %, people are going to die. The individuals can’t be blamed for this, the bloody government have blood on their hands.

The Letby inquiry has not yet finished. I think she’s guilty but the inquiry might turn up more info, so we shall see.

I think the doctor was failed by her practice but there is professional capability too.

With the head of SS, the Secretary of State used to approve appointments but I don’t think the government is the employer. So public sacking wrong on many fronts. Sharon Shoesmith has written a book about the issues surrounding this case and that might be worth a read. The Labour government was populist. Of course these days it would be social media all over it.

I just think ordinary folk want to trust the police, social workers and doctors. They find it incredulous that highly trained, and sometimes highly paid, professionals get it so wrong. The Sun and others were OTT but these days they are not the only hate source.

But many times, they DON’T get through the whole of A&E. People die. Things are missed which leads to horrible consequences. Sometimes “the best of your ability” still won’t save people

It's vital that we scrutinise these tragic cases for weakness in the system. Thanks to the review of Baby P, social workers will now never allow a child to remain 'dirty' if they visit. They will insist that heavy creams, nutella, etc., are wiped off of the child, in case it is hiding an injury. We learn from the past and prevent in the future.

When you read the list of injuries that boy sustained, someone, somewhere, should have noticed and done something. The fact that all of the services weren't working together needed to change.

I don't think one person is responsible for Peter's death, but we can't let that stop us trying to make everything better so it doesn't happen again.

Letby was guilty.
She's lost her appeal, too.

She's had further charges added after her first conviction.

I know there are conspiracy theorists who think she's innocent. They're wrong.

It was a witch hunt because specific individuals were targeted, named , hunted and put on media trial when the faults were in the system and procedures.

Why weren't the police officers and the CPS person responsible for deciding to not prosecute the two previous incidents named,shamed and fired?

I have 2 adopted children. Our experience was that social services were concerned for a long time, but just kept adding new reports to the file. It was only when something catastrophic happened (younger one was rushed to hospital) that they took any action.

Birth parents were well liked by the sws, who gave them chance after chance. The birth parents avoided health visitor and social worker meetings for months and no one did anything.

It is astonishing imo what you can do to children before social services will act. At my daughter's nursery they call social services at the slightest hint of a problem, but thereafter it takes a huge incident for anything further to happen.

Look at those two sets of twins who died in a house fire in Sutton - the case was in the paper this week. The squalor in the house was awful, sws knew she left them on their own, still nothing.....

@the7Vabo the mother is another failure of the system. She was a child that lived in a DV household, then moved away, a violent brother who was abused by the mother. She herself was neglected and abuse was suspected. She was on a child protection register herself and recommendations were made for her to attend school in a specialised/institutionalised setting. She was taken off the CP register and pregnant at 16.

Was Ed Balls her employer? He circumvented dismissal procedures. Surely? Hence she was awarded the money,

We also forget that Barker, the step father got 12 years and he’s awful!

I think if a doctor sees a child and misses serious injuries, maybe they should be disciplined as they are not competent. We do pay the NHS, police and SS to do a job. There’s always going to be an outcry when they don’t and a child dies.