Have the statutory agencies learnt nothing since Victoria Climbie

[Soontobegrandma]

It’s 21 years since Victoria Climbie died from abuse and neglect at the hands of her mother’s aunt. She had been repeatedly let down by Police and children’s social care and there were countless opportunities that were missed to remove and protect her.

Are we really no further forward in carrying out those protective roles. As a young detective new to child protection work I read the report from the enquiry, which was hundreds of pages long. I was determined to ensure I never myself repeated any of the mistakes that were made by the Police officers involved.

Yet here we are again in 2021 with another dead child, tortured and tormented beyond belief. Yet again children’s social care missed injuries and opportunities to intervene.

I know the context of the timing of Arthur’s tragic murder is unusual in that it was during lockdown but that does not negate the continual absolute shit show of a response from social workers.

There are other threads about Emma Tustin but I just wondered what the thoughts of other children’s social care and child protection professionals were regarding the failures. It very much feels like the system is broken as it currently stands.

When lockdown happened I remember saying to colleagues that so many children would fall down the cracks now they were not being seen at school. School is the place for many children where they are safe, fed and cared for and where they can safely confide if there are issues going on at home. So many children will have been locked down with their abusers. It’s horrendous to think about.

I think social services are damned if they do, and damned if they don't. Things people are suggesting on the other thread are insane and if they happened we'd be horrified - children being dragged off their parents the second any allegation is made etc.

I know that SS have also saved LOTS of children in between these two cases. Whether they're found at fault with this case or not (and I don't know enough about it really to make a judgement myself), there will be lots of times when they have got it right, but of course those don't hit the media. I have worked with a few children where their outcomes would have been much much much worse without SS.

What I do think needs to change is whole-society views and the ways we currently behave. We need to be supporting vulnerable families so much more than we do (but there is a view that they should be responsible for themselves, see comments about feeding kids during holidays). We need to make therapy much more accessible to all, to enable people to break the generational trauma links that enable these behaviours to continue (but see comments about hoping they're tortured in prison). We need to fund social care and education so much better so that people are working within their capacities and the best people aren't flocking to other professions. We need to see these people not as 'evil' or 'other' to us, but as people whose behaviour could have been prevented.

I said it on the other thread but I really recommend reading 'The Devil You Know' by Gwen Ashead. Her thoughts on why horrific things happen, informed by her work with the perpetrators, really stayed with me.

s terrible as these cases are. And they are truly horrendous. As a PP said. We only hear about it when things go wrong. Not the hundreds of children saved and helped.

Adshead*

Sorry quick reply from me as I have to go out, but strangely enough I read through the Climbie report again last week. The overriding issue was the missed opportunities from children’s services, police acted upon reports made to them but could only act upon the reports made to them but still there were no concerns when they did see Victoria in person. There were issues with putting some incidents down to culture, and I think that may still be the case, no one wants to believe the worst is happening but as a professional you have to know the difference and not try and explain injuries, behaviours and concerns away.

It’s an uncomfortable thing to do to challenge a parent , guardian or care giver even when you are acting in a professional capacity and I’m not sure from your post how much experience you have (quite a lot?) as I too read it way back in 2004 and didn’t forget it.
A lot of the good work done will come from your own determination and knowing that you’ve done all you can when dealing with a child at risk. A lot of officers and general public will be going initially by their gut feeling that all is not well with child and it’s the first contact that makes the difference in my opinion, how you deal with a child who has come to police or child services attention is different because you KNOW that there is a problem. You have to be able to say you did all YOU could to help a child.

Sorry if it’s waffle, I don’t know really if things are better or worse and I’m a few years out of the loop now so just my thoughts.

And Maria Colwell before that and Baby P more recently.

PPs are right, sadly every so often some poor little one slips through the net and dies in awful circumstances - sometimes DCs are taken from good parents for no good reason and they have to fight to get them back.

It's an imperfect system and occasionally there are terrible tragedies, but yet it still manages to help many people and save lives. You have to look at the overall picture.

I think social services are damned if they do, and damned if they don't. Things people are suggesting on the other thread are insane and if they happened we'd be horrified - children being dragged off their parents the second any allegation is made etc.

I agree. There's a constant pendulum swing - a child dies and people insist SS don't intervene enough; but then people think that SS are being too heavy-handed and 'removing children over nothing'. There's a strong presumption that children should stay with their family of origin and that's there for good reason, but it is sometimes actively unhelpful.

In the aftermath of a tragedy people tend to feel that it's better that children are removed unnecessarily than that they stay in possibly abusive situations - err on the side of caution - but people don't really want to live with how that would play out in practice, with loads more children in care and families destroyed.

There'll always be inadequate, abusive and neglectful parents and some children will continue to be killed because it's a terrible fact of life. Social services can't work miracles especially when parents are evasive and manage to lie their way out of things. I was removed from my mother as a young child because she was over dosing me on medication I then ended up in an abusive foster family and things became even worse for me. I was lucky to get out alive. Some people are just awful. Social workers are just like the rest of the population, some good, some stupid, some bad and some will slack off and miss things in order to cope with their workload.

There’s definitely so many fantastic, dedicated and hard working social workers. I’ve worked with many in my 30 years of law enforcement and child protection work.

I do think it’s more of a workload issue rather than social workers not being interested.

It’s just so sad. That poor little boy.

The terrible under resourcing of childrens’ services are a measure of how little we as a society give a shit about kids.

I was coming on to talk about workload. If it's too high then no one can do their job well and the stress just makes the conscientious sw burn out. And long term it puts people off entering the profession so the calibre of sw goes down and down.

Saw a post on here yesterday by a sw miscarrying in hospital and stressing about her case load. Poor woman couldn't even give herself time to grieve her loss.

The thing is you get cases like this one where people have told social services over and over again that they are concerned, social services go in and decide nothing is wrong, or don't try very hard to get in, and child is murdered.

And then you have the cases where a loving parent takes their child to hospital with an injury - the hospital raise concerns and social services can't take the child away quickly enough.

How does that work? So if I raise a concern about my grandchild (who I know really well) social services will tell me I am a stupid old woman. But if a clinician raises concerns having seen one bruise, they must be right? It does seem to be that lessons DO need to be learnt but they never are.

Have the statutory agencies government learnt nothing about the dangers of underfunding social services since Victoria Climbie

Fixed it for you.
They can't possibly keep every child safe when their caseload is ten times what is safe.

@pianolessons1

Have the statutory agencies government learnt nothing about the dangers of underfunding social services since Victoria Climbie

Fixed it for you.
They can't possibly keep every child safe when their caseload is ten times what is safe.

The caseloads are insane that’s for sure. The system needs a complete overhaul.

Some really good points on this thread re chronic underfunding over a LONG period of time and the impacts of that on social workers’ caseloads and morale.

Would also add that wider society also has a part to play. How many times do we see threads on here started by people who have a concern but feel like it’s not serious enough to raise it with a professional? And how many more people have concerns but don’t start threads and don’t seek professional input?

It’s an imperfect system, but we can’t just stand on the outside chucking rocks at it - we need to do our part in raising concerns and looking out for kids as well.