Emma Tustin is a murderer

[DueyCheatemAndHow]

Finally. We can say it.

I've just utterly broken down for Arthur.

@Drinkingallthewine

Way back in the late 80's my family had a SS referral based on my older sibling confiding in a friend that she was beaten. Friend then told her mother who told SS. Sibling was removed from school by SS and a specialist policewoman, and interviewed before DM and DD even was aware.

Happily, in our case, my DPs were willing to work with SS, and took on board that the physical punishments they meted out as a first resort had to stop. They never hit us again and used normal methods of discipline from that point on. The DPs my younger siblings remember and the ones us older ones remember are like two different sets of parents. Life changing, and in a good way, for us DC. Because DM and DD did genuinely love us, did genuinely want us to turn out well, the SS intervention for them was a massive, unwelcome, terrifying and intrusive wake up call where they had no option but to shape up as parents or lose us.

These days, parents would intimidate or scoff at those two angels who were our voice. They'd abuse them and make them too afraid to set foot inside the door. They would be threatened and unable to speak to a child alone. And we would have been just another family of damaged souls either remaining victims of abusive homes or possibly perpetrators. But in our case, in the country we lived in, and at the time, the authorities didn't give a fuck about parental feelings or rights. Their priority was a child at risk, and it was a child-centered approach. I don't know how we've migrated away from that so much where what the adults want takes centre stage.

So here's what I think I'd like to see, based on my own experiences:
I would like to see a system where Arthur's grandmother could have taken him to a healthcare professional trained in child abuse, for an extensive check, well away from a scary parent, before any coaching can take place. Similar to SARC centers, but specific to child abuse. That theoretically I should be able to turn up with my GC/niece/other relative for a full independent check and not be threatened with a kidnap charge for trying to help a child.

I would like to see unannounced visits to the home. And a detailed look at the living conditions of all the children, and know all and any red flags to spot. Where all children spoken to away from their potential abuser, before any coaching can take place by SS workers who are extensively trained and have a manageable case-load. Where police attend if there's a possibility of things kicking off. Where the welfare of the child is the only thing that matters. Not rights or feelings or any of that. Just child welfare at the very heart of it all.

The sibling I mentioned above? Now divorced from her abusive H (see the generational effect there?), her DC are by law forced to visit their DF despite him having moved in with a stepmother who a)barely knows them and b) already told them she hates them and has been verbally and emotionally abusive to them and egging on an already abusive dad to physically abuse them. They are 'othered' in the home they spend 50% of their time in many ways other than the violence. Treated differently to the stepmother's children. And the law is on the fathers side. Any reports my sibling tried to make was treated as malicious towards her ex.

The saving grace is that the DC are mid teens so have somewhat of a voice and are refusing to go to their dads - and we hope that their voice is enough for a judge to give them permission to not see their dad any more. There's already a strong possibility that one of them is a sitting duck for an abusive relationship, and another has the potential to be an abuser themselves given the anger issues they already display - luckily they are all getting great counselling and have been for some years so I only hope it's enough to break the intergenerational acceptance of chaotic home lives.

But we all need to be nosy. We need to stop telling ourselves that maybe we are only seeing a snapshot. Or that shitheads are great dads when they fall so short of the basics a parent should do. My DM called that friends mother all the names when she found out she had been reported by her to SS. Even now, she dislikes her but you know what, I think that woman is fucking brilliant and if I ever get the chance to meet her and tell her that her picking up the phone changed my life, I will.

@Drinkingallthewine 100% everything you say here x

[quote Bagelsandbrie]@thedancingbear I genuinely think the social workers involved in this case should be charged with failing to carry out their duties correctly and failure to protect a child. Losing their jobs - if that has happened, who knows- isn’t enough.[/quote]
You're nuts. What about their families? What about their kids? Are they going into care?

Because they missed something - something that the perpetrators, cunning, devious bastards - did their best to cover up?

Fucking hell, I hope you never make a mistake in work.

I should add that earlier in the trial one of the social workers who visited Arthur at home had conveniently “lost her notes” about the meeting and was chastised by the Judge. In fact they stopped proceedings for a day or so whilst ss were given the chance to find those notes, which they then did and had to bring them to the court. The judge said to them (can’t quote exactly as cannot remember word for word but essentially-) “Do you not realise the seriousness of this case?” Which speaks volumes. If a Judge is getting that feeling from them (there were two of them in the trial) then it shows their whole approach was / would have been wrong.

[quote Bagelsandbrie]@Gonnagetgoing there’s no doubt Tustin has serious issues - she was sexually abused at an early age by her Mums partner (not the same partner who reported his concerns about Arthur to social services), she’s tried to commit suicide twice, difficult relationship with her Mum, kids by several different men none of whom she’s stayed with, kids removed from her care etc etc. All of these things must have had a huge impact on her. But she’s not psychotic. She was deemed mentally well enough to stand trial and to stand trial without pleading diminished responsibility. So where do we draw the line with these things? I was an abused child. I’ve had horrendous things happen to me, both as a child and as an adult. I find it very hurtful people seem to assume the cycle of abuse will continue. I would rather die than hurt my children or any child.

At the end of the day she was an adult with the capacity to make decisions for herself.[/quote]
I agree with this. When you realise you are not coping and you are a parent you reach out for help.

That video of her after she's murdered him, blaming him, as six year old child, for not being nice enough to her! Jesus!

@KurtWildesChristmasNamechange

If people genuinely want SS to start intervening at an earlier juncture then we will all have to accept a far higher level of police/SS interventions in our families.

And I would be fine with that, as I think many people would be. When I was a kid people WERE worried about SS taking their kids away, and as far as I'm aware they could drop in without prior arrangement during the 80s (correct me if I'm wrong!) These days everything is done so softly softly that people aren't frightened by anything - whether that be a visit from SS, the police, of any other 'higher power'. It's pathetic that fear over a visit from these services is diluted because everything has to be PC. Whilst that continues, whilst there is no hardline with these families, children like Arthur and Star and Grace and Kemarni will continue to suffer horrifically at the hands of their 'caters'.

I think when we had that, we also had terrible cases where children were removed on hearsay, even forced adoptions, then look at the terrible sexual abuse that occurred in some children's homes?

Councils no longer have the funds or the means to put children into care, so the presumption has become to keep the child with the parents if at all possible.

We have half the number of Police than most EU countries but even then, we expect them to pick up the pieces from a failed social services and mental health provision.

We even penalised women with panic rooms and cut their housing benefit & closed domestic refuges.

Its all very sad.

That Swiss cheese model is a great illustration.

I want to see more money going into social services so that social workers can have the time and space to properly follow up cases. Some of them are under massive pressure with huge numbers of children to oversee that they will readily accept parent/cared explanations if they absolutely can get away with it.

Giving more resources won’t necessarily mean we all see more intervention - it will mean that the cases that need intervention will get that intervention.

Poor Arthur. How fucking shit.

When working in a local authority we were warned that more cases like this would happen. I wonder how many more Arthurs are out there.

The reality of this could be police officers knocking on your door at 2am, removing your children to another address overnight, interviewing them with an unrelated adult, detaining you, questioning you under caution, surveillance on your phone, people being forced to disclose details of new partners to police/SS, intrusive surveillance, spot checks on your property.

I wouldn't fucking like it, who would - and honestly, my neighbour is a vindictive sort that would relish reporting me if she could.
But it might be a necessary step in substantially changing lives for other children at risk. And I don't have a problem with any of these:
disclosing a new partner - what's wrong with that? Surely we should be ensuring that new adults that spend time in our children's homes have no red flags in their background.
spot checks on my property - nothing to hide tbh. Root around all you like. You'll find me a bit messy, and the odd time my car tax is expired but you won't find drugs, random men, lack of food, toys, heat, clothes for the DC.
interviewing my DS without a related adult - as long as it's a specialist trained professional in a professional setting such as a child interview room then I'm ok with it. There's nothing DS could say to them that would cause me concerns.
I'd be rather terrified being interviewed under caution as I'm sure anyone would if but if it meant that a child that's at risk - even mine, unbeknownst to me - gets properly checked out, I'd have to be ok with that.

@Drinkingallthewine 100% everything you say here x

Yes. Absolutely all of what you said.

Just had to come on to post with nothing new to say. I've been following the case for a while and cannot stop thinking about that poor boy. He looks like my own DS, who was up in the middle of the night and would usually sharply be told to get back to bed but I took him into bed and held him all night long.

I just cannot understand why. Just pure evil.

[quote User57327259]@MissLucyEyelesbarrow Trying to make excuses is not the right way to deal with this. Again you do not know the situation around me but I do. I know what social workers have done and not done and as a result of a fair amount of interaction over many years and over more than just childrens' services, I do not have a good word to say about them. I would love to give examples of their stupidity but that would be a breach of confidentiality, a matter social workers do not seem to understand.
I am not scapegoating social workers I am relating my experiences but maintaining a lot of confidentiality.[/quote]
I'm afraid this is my experience too. I parent my grandson and had ALOT of involvement with them when it became clear my very young and adopted daughter could not cope with parenting her baby (I mention this as she suffered severe abuse at the hands of her birth family and this goes someone way to explaining why she couldn't cope with her own child). Over the years there has been 5 social workers involved with my family. Only one was decent. They treated me diabolically in many different ways - way too many to list. Perhaps the most staggering being that they insisted that gs went into a nursery local to our home whilst I worked. The trouble was I worked an hour a way from our home as a teacher, meaning I had to leave home at 7am. The nursery didn't open until 8am. Absolutely no care about how I could logistically manage this when he could go to a brilliant childminder down the road from where I worked, giving him an extra 2 hours a day with me (albeit in the car but we used to sing and talk all the way). I did fight it and at one point wrote to my local councillor and they did capitulate and allowed me to take him to the childminder 3 days a week and the nursery 2 days a week. The insisted I got a court order giving me custody but then wrote to the judge saying they were worried that I worked full time. The judge's response was 'How do they expect you to pay the mortgage if you don't work?' (I'm a single woman) and so the list goes on and on and on. I'm afraid if Children's Services in Solihull are as poor as they are round here, I can absolutely see how this happened.

I genuinely think the social workers involved in this case should be charged with failing to carry out their duties correctly and failure to protect a child. Losing their jobs - if that has happened, who knows- isn’t enough.

Because that would really encourage more people to go into social work.....

Sentencing is commencing now.

Here's the link for the live updates:

www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/live-murder-arthur-labinjo-hughes-21764057

I know absolutely nothing about how child protection works but (maybe I am being naieve) I find it surprising that there are not some circumstances/known events in a child's life which do not automatically trigger a "red alert" status for any child.
For example - (as in this case) if a child has a parent who is convicted of murder and at the time of the murder the child was in the care (full or part time) of that murderer. However good the rest of the family are, the psychological burden for the child of having a parental figure who has murdered someone is surely enough to put them on an escalated care level.
(2) Having a day to day carer who has previously had children taken into care themselves (i.e. ET)
(3) There being accounts where the child has said that they feel in serious physical danger in the presence of any parent or care giver. Maybe I am wrong but i dont think most children go around saying "daddy is going to kill me" or the like and if children come out with that it should trigger a high alert situation
(4) Multiple reports by different family members

@vickyp0llard

I genuinely think the social workers involved in this case should be charged with failing to carry out their duties correctly and failure to protect a child. Losing their jobs - if that has happened, who knows- isn’t enough.

Because that would really encourage more people to go into social work.....

Completely beside the point.

All people from all walks and life and jobs should be held criminally accountable if their actions deserve it.

We’re not talking about a small mistake or an oversight. We’re talking about people who failed to do their jobs properly or even adequately and that led to the death of a child. They didn’t just forget to lock a door or burn a sandwich at a cafe. These are serious jobs, with serious consequences and should be addressed as such.

massively abusive childhoods breed abusers

It plays a part- no doubt. But there has to be some other factor. Both my parents were terribly abused by their fathers. Neither laid a hand on me or my sister. They knew it was wrong.

One of the things that strikes me about both Arthur and Stars cases is that their abuse was both times reported to social services by several different people. Surely that should raise some sort of red flag for a more intense investigation? It's one thing to be reported once- I'm aware some people do this for more malicious reasons- but multiple people voicing concerns for a child should be a cause for alarm

Ultimately, this is our fault..

If we want decent services we have to pay higher taxes. As a nation, we don't want to do that, so we get the services we're prepared to pay for.

Our fault. Collective responsibility. That child's blood is on our hands.

@deeedeee

I don’t think the impact of lockdown and school closures has been spoken about enough in this case.

Without lockdown these two defective human beings would not have been locked in a house together with this vulnerable traumatised little boy for months, isolated from sources of support, family, normal coping strategies . With his school closing Arthur would still be alive.

Easy enough to call them evil but if you lock damaged people with personality disorders in brand new relationships that are pregnant with small traumatised children in a house together and take away every bit of routine and societal support they had then it’s obviously a recipe for disaster. I’m surprised there wasn’t an Arthur in every town during lockdown. In fact there will have been, most of them still alive and irrevocably damaged , beginning a lifetime of Trying to deal with the effects on their lives of this kind of trauma. And many of them beginning the cycle again.

All the people clamouring constantly for the schools to shut last year should rethink. The schools should not shut again.

Totally agree.

Our fault. Collective responsibility. That child's blood is on our hands.

Jux, I agree. There are many who say they can't listen to the details of the case because it's too distressing.

They should

Arthur didn't have the luxury of ignoring it. He was living it. He was slowly dying it. Suffering minute by minute at the hands of these monsters.

So we should bear witness to this little broken boy. He went unheard in his short lifetime. We owe it to him to hear him now. And if it makes you upset, tough shit. If it makes you want to change things by getting on to your MP, or take a closer look at the circumstances of the child you know that you've always had an uneasy feeling about, enough to pick up the phone good.

@Jux

Ultimately, this is our fault..

If we want decent services we have to pay higher taxes. As a nation, we don't want to do that, so we get the services we're prepared to pay for.

Our fault. Collective responsibility. That child's blood is on our hands.

What an offensive thing to say.

The people responsible here is the murderer, his df and anyone who witnessed their abuse and didn't do anything about it.

I don't have 'blood on my hands'.

Ss should have removed him and allowed his dgps to care for him.

Imagine a scenario where a vindictive ex or malicious neighbour kept reporting you fir child abuse etc when it was totally spurious. Unfortunately this is a reality for a lot of people. We get lots of reports made about child concerns, when it is clear that there is an agenda

It's the job of the family courts and Social Services and the police to differentiate, not to make assumptions that family members or neighbours are being vindictive.
Remember this: www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/21/ben-butler-found-guilty-of-murdering-six-year-old-daughter-ellie
It's difficult. Families are complex and people are easily taken in. Someone could post on MN about their vindictive MIL making reports and get sympathy.
I don't envy CAFCASS and Social Services their jobs.
This case is horrific.

e.g. one child had an metal framed bed, few toys and hardly any books and was expected to behave like children of olden days re behaviour.

What’s wrong with a metal framed bed? I have a metal framed bed, my son has a metal framed bed. It has footballs on it. He picked it.

@DaphneDeloresMoorhead I'd be fine with that. Because I have absolutely nothing to hide. My DC are well looked after, safe and happy. If a couple of rough nights for us meant some child somewhere who actually WAS in danger ended up being taken the safety then yeah, go for it. I'd be more concerned by someone who said they weren't ok with that tbh.

My neighbour was a foster carer 20 years ago. I can't go into details but she took 2 very badly abused and neglected children in, a toddler and a newborn. She cried every time she had to take those poor kids to the contact centre as the toddler always regressed when he came back. The plan was they would be returned to their parents despite the catalogue of abuse. She lobbied SS constantly as the toddler was clearly highly distressed when he was in the presence of his parents and for a few days after. But she was told they would try to keep the family together, it would just take some time.

The only reason that didn't happen was because the parents fractured the 8 week olds leg whilst at the contact centre.

Whilst we STILL try and put clearly vulnerable children back with negligent and abusive parents, whilst we STILL put the right of the parents above the rights of the children, cases like this will continue to happen. And all the 'lessons learned' bullshit will be rolled out again and again.

In my neighbours case, the happy ending is that she was able to apply to adopt them both, and they're lovely, well adjusted young adults now. The outcome could've been very different.

*I don’t think the impact of lockdown and school closures has been spoken about enough in this case.

Without lockdown these two defective human beings would not have been locked in a house together with this vulnerable traumatised little boy for months, isolated from sources of support, family, normal coping strategies . With his school closing Arthur would still be alive.

Easy enough to call them evil but if you lock damaged people with personality disorders in brand new relationships that are pregnant with small traumatised children in a house together and take away every bit of routine and societal support they had then it’s obviously a recipe for disaster. I’m surprised there wasn’t an Arthur in every town during lockdown. In fact there will have been, most of them still alive and irrevocably damaged , beginning a lifetime of Trying to deal with the effects on their lives of this kind of trauma. And many of them beginning the cycle again.

All the people clamouring constantly for the schools to shut last year should rethink. The schools should not shut again.*

I was shouting this in April 2020, that shutting schools was a dangerous step to take and not protecting our most vulnerable babies. Whilst there were people on here panicking about touching fence posts and eating crisps on a bench, I was dealing with a 10yo boy who'd jumped out a first floor window to escape his Mums abuse breaking both his legs.

But I was shot down in flames over and over again. Well, now, here is the proof!! Poor baby.

@lollipoprainbow

The police should have powers to force their way into a home if they suspect abuse is taking place and check the child thoroughly for bruises etc. According to reports the police in this case were too scared to confront the mother.

The police have power to remove for 48 hours, that’s it. In that time a report has to be prepared and submitted to request an emergency court hearing. The judge has the final decision in removal, based on reports and recommendations.

If none of this can be done, or the judge does not agree, the child is returned.

48 hours.