@FanGirlX
To a certain extent, you can't save every child, but when other people have raised concerns and social services are aware of them, it's just another layer of horror really.
I can't get over the 5 referrals and the photo of Star's bruised face. Social Services needs root and branch reform. Surely they have the power to have taken her away for a respite stay with foster parents or family while they investigated further. It seems to me like they aren't putting the welfare of the children first.
No, they wouldn’t have had that power. They asked a paediatrician to look at the bruising to give a view on whether what FS/SB were saying about the bruising was likely to be true. The paediatrician decided there wasn’t evidence of non-accidental injury. Therefore the social workers would not have had grounds or evidence to apply to the court for a care order. Had the paediatrician formed the view that the bruising may have been caused by one of the adults, the response would have been different.
Clearly there was some investigations done by social workers, we will see when the serious case review comes out at what point things went wrong, but they wouldn’t have had the power to remove Star as things stood, sadly. There is a legal threshold that needs to be met and evidenced.
I agree that it can be daunting and scary to visit families where you know someone is violent and will hate you and may be violent towards you - I’ve had death threats, I’ve visited homes where I’ve sat down to see a strategically placed hunting knife just in view, I’ve been intimidated and threatened regularly. I have walked into homes where police officers wouldn’t go unless they were in pairs. But I always tried to keep the thought in my head - if I’m scared, how must it feel to be a child here? However I think there needs to be more robust protection for social workers, joint visits etc. no resources to do that though.
As for saying social workers are scared so instead pick easy targets who don’t need intervention - completely wrong, we don’t have time to spend on visiting people who don’t need help!
And as for saying it’s not a money issue because social workers get paid - we do, but how many of us are there? They need to invest in more social workers, better conditions to keep experienced people in the job, more resources to support us in doing work with families and helping families at earlier stages. Sure you can pay three social workers, but if each of them has 35 children on their caseload that they’re supposed to visit weekly, it doesn’t take long to fall down when you’re actively having to choose who to let down and who of that 35 is at least risk of dying, because you can’t do it all.