In wondering what the hell needs to happen for social workers and doctors to be held accountable for their mistakes ?? ** Extremely distressing content **

[SkintAsASkintThing]

I know it's late but as the adult who was one of four brushed aside children of the 80's who as a result suffered repeated abuse I really can't understand why this is happening time and time again. When will these lessons be learnt ??

And I know abusers are manipulative and clever and charming but fucking hell, this has to be one of the worse things i've read. This by the way happened in the same town that little Poppi Worthington came from, why are children being let down like this ?? Does no one care ??

www.nwemail.co.uk/news/Council-bosses-apologise-after-harrowing-report-reveals-social-workers-failed-to-protect-toddler-with-leg-bruises-and-genital-warts-5f0b184a-b6e5-47a6-8d3e-f551420b3adf-ds

The doctor who ignored evidence of the abuse I was going through was herself later struck off for abusing her children. IMO this country is not the place to get justice if you are a victim of pedophiles.

I hope you are in a better place now

I don't know. They seem unable to focus on the children in need or make any sensible assessment.

Sorry to hear that you have suffered abuse.

The poor children in this report. It does seem that Cumbria have completely failed in their duty here. How the child can have been left in that situation with seemingly overwhelming evidence is beyond me, but I think that this sort of thing is only going to become more common as Social Services everywhere are so overstretched.

I am a teacher and we have so much safeguarding training - at least once a term. We fill out written reports for every small concern as it impossible to even get a referral to SS without reams of evidence. We have had serious concerns about some children and contacted SS repeatedly, but the most that ever seems to happen is that the family may get one visit from a social worker and no follow-up. I know most social workers work very hard, but there just don't seem to be enough of them.

Every time there's an article like this, we're told 'lessons have been learned'. It seems they haven't been, as these tragedies continue.

How else did they imagine a toddler got genital warts? It's appalling. Those poor children.

It's money, it's always money. Not enough social workers mean some children fall through the gaps in the system. It's heartbreaking seeing the same thing time and time again and nothing seems to change.

It is awful, especially what happened to poor Poppi, but as the report says these cases are often very complicated, I imagine funding has been cut and they don't have enough staff/resources to protect every child. It's utterly tragic though.

Shadow...did you mean to name the child? Is that the name the press are using? I hope it's not her real name.

There's a serious case review going on within our local authority regarding the abuse of my Son whilst he's been in care . This Is apparently for them to learn lessons and make sure it never happens again ... yet I have zero trust in the system and it will happen again . The abuse was happening whilst he was living with professional carers (1 had a job in authority !) Involving other children in placement .

They are now having to spend thousands of pounds every week paying to put him into a specialist unit to deal with this problem but it could've been dealt with if during the 5 and half years in the system if he hadn't been shoved from one placement to another, with employed carers who are not fit to be looking after vulnerable children .(we've had 1 who turned out to be an alcoholic and another who was using my child to babysit a disabled child in placement , my child had a plate of vegetables for Christmas dinner!) Every 6 months social workers go into meetings armed with so many plans for kids and nothing gets done. My Son has been waiting 5 years for an EHCP to be done . Every meeting they pass this responsibility between themselves and school and neither do it . Therapists have rules kids have to be settled in 1 placement for them to start getting therapy . Just as my lad starts to settle they move him and the cycle starts again !
At present he's been in a placement where the carer is mentally abusing him . Screaming in his face and shouting constantly . The negativity oozes through this horrible man and every professional has said they ain't happy about him looking after my son but he's still there being abused by him . Last weekend my son was in absolute tears coz the carer screams right in his face ... but because of the lack of good carers ss have nowhere to put him!

I actually feel sorry for the children going into the system now . It was a very different system 5 years ago. It's all about money now . The cost is looked at over the needs of the child.

I sat in a meeting a few weeks ago about my son and the person holding the meeting was moaning to the social worker about the new systems they are putting into place . He said himself he felt sorry for the public having to contact ss within our area , he said they have made it so difficult to get through to anyone that now it was quicker for him to drive to the building where the person he wants to speak to is based rather than try to find them in the call system . He said if they can't even locate the person he doesn't know how the public are gonna get through. He said they want to put call monitors in reception for receptionists to become better at answering calls and he agreed himself the pressure on them as an organisation right now is immense ...

But all that will happen is social workers will leave, carers will leave or become picky about the kids they take on , they have already got rid of all the office staff within our ss dept , they went recently so more pressure on the staff left to do other roles and this is taking away the role of what is important ... to protect our children ! So many social workers I guess go into the job wanting to make a difference to famillies but right now they are failing plenty more kids because the system can't cope with the demand and the budgets are all over the place .

Numbmum, can your son stay with you?

I think the name given above refers to another tragic child case that is very well known, and not the case of the children referred to in the above report.

This subject really depresses me. Children are not born to suffer, so feckless parents should just fuck off full stop.

Not a very constructive comment, admittedly, but life is unfair enough without people deliberately inflicting cruelty on the vulnerable.

No he's so in need of help now that because it's sexual he's a risk . He's 13 and my biggest worry is that he will end up in prison . I would have him home tomorrow but he has a lot of behaviour issues. I begged for help when he was at home but the issues have just got worse . He is going to a specialist unit hopefully next week which I have fought for for so long because with sexual problems it doesn't just go away? I have Been torn apart by posters on here before because my kids are in care but I've been through hell for them , because they are my kids. Not every child in the system has parents who have abused them . I was in a relationship with a now diagnosed narcisstic and between him and the behaviour of my son I was in a bad place . But at the time because my kids were clean , fed , had day trips and holidays , were at school every day i thought I was coping ... but I wasn't.

Then my world absolutely collapsed .

I see my kids 6 times a year and our bond is amazing. The LA kept me out of meetings for 3 years with different excuses and it took them a year to tell me what happened to my son and even now I only know bare minimum .

I am hoping and praying after a little while in this unit and after help and therapy he will be able to come home. I'm pushing for more contact with him right now because obviously it's not a family set up and his emotional side is just as important as his mental. I am petrified the sexual abuse will come out further down the line because the police took the stance he was a victim but ss said they feel he was a perpetrator too .
Sometimes sadly you have to do what is best for your child and throughout all this all I want is my kids happy and to grow up knowing they are loved and will always have a home with their family when the time comes .

numb mum, that all sounds horrific and Im sorry life is so hard for all you. It really is the most awful of situations.

Sorry, at the end of the article they mentioned some serious case reviews including the one for Poppi Worthington, she's named in the article linked to above. She died almost 5 years ago and they're still waiting to start the second inquest into her death. Five years, it's such a long time.

numbmum83, I'm sorry to read about how hard things have been for you and your son. I hope things work out ok for you both

Awww but I always see that life isn't as black and white as we think . I've learnt tough lessons along the way . I still see my kids and we get to still be a family unit , some children / adults don't get that opportunity . Sadly there are so many kids in the system whos parents have walked away . So many teenagers are being moved from home to home . I spoke to a girl a while ago who said she was 17 and had been in over 50 placements . How can that give these kids a good start ?

But problem is with this child protection system they are damned if they do and damned if they don't .

It costs hundreds every week to keep a child in care , yet this money should be ploughed into helping parents before it gets to the stages of needing to knock parents doors. There s little support for parents . Everywhere they could go is being shut down . We need more preventative methods . Local areas having more money to put more activities on for parents to help them ... but it's a big circle , where does this money from ?

Thank you Kelpie and Shadow. I appreciate the kind comments. I keep my fingers crossed the move will be the best thing for my lad . He lives in the local area right now but moving out of England when he goes . We are finding it tough mainly coz I know he's scared of moving again. He got his Nan to buy him a suitcase when we took him shopping last week .
But sometimes we have to do what is best and he's only a child for a little while and an adult for a lot longer. Him being in prison scares me , no one wants that for their child .

I spoke to a poster a while back who had a background of this stuff and she said to push for something like this, I didn't know about them at the time . So thank you smallthings. I'm not sure if you're still around.

I agree with Pebbles. Trying to get SS to take notice let alone act on anything is becoming very difficult. Children are getting hurt, emotionally damaged and unless its screaming them in the face (via other agencies pushing continuously) nothing gets done and in reality it's the charity's and none statutory agencies that are keeping children safe. Ss don't touch cases until its hit severe crisis.

There are not enough social workers because they are hated. The continued bashing from the media, severe underfunding and the sheer amount of malicious calls from divorcing parents who use SS to make false allegations about the other parent, purely out of spite, which have to be investigated, means each social worker has so little time with each family. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Many times they go to court and ask for a child to be removed only for the judge to refuse and of course, when that child is seriously harmed it will be the social workers, not the judge or the parents who receive the abuse on the media. It takes a special kind of person to do a job that involves receiving abuse and blame every single day for doing a job that you get into because you want to help children. Of course there are crap, lazy and incompetent social workers but no more than in any other job. The rest of them are swimming in treacle, unable to defend themselves when they are publicly shamed due to confiendtiality. Let's try to remember the people to blame for abuse are the abusers.

Unfortunately some parts of Cumbria are hugely deprived and underfunded, especially a lot of the coastal towns and old mining communities.

People think of Cumbria and they see the gorgeous scenery and the National Park and cream teas and Peter Rabbit, but outside of that, there is practically no money. A lot of seaside towns and villages are chronically deprived (including Barrow) - there's just no money or investment.

It's lack of staff causing ridiculous case loads. It's the worshiping of the NHS and the hatred of social care - you never ever see the same campaigns for wage rises for social workers as you do for NHS staff. Social workers are demoralised, exhausted and buried in hundreds of cases all similar to the next one and all they get is bile spewed at them.

How did he end up in care, numbmum ?

Child protection systems have got so complex that SWs have to spend half their working lives on admin, recording and shite rather than actually working with families and protecting children.

They're constantly stressed from having to deal with people who resent their involvement and are totally un-cooperative, and bricking it in case they've missed something. They have a high level of staff sickness and high staff turnover. There are some authorities where more than half their frontline staff are agency temps. SWs often prefer temp work because it's much better paid and they can afford to take long breaks between jobs. The SWs who are really good and committed get promoted to management positions where the skills they have acquired don't really get used.

They get no end of abuse from clients (I know an SW who was repeatedly threatened with murder by a client, assaults are not unusual and verbal abuse a commonplace, an SW who was working on a case with a colleague of mine regularly had her car smeared with shit on one estate). And then when they fuck up, as some of them inevitably will, they get slaughtered by the press and lose their careers.

Beats me why anyone does the job, tbh.

Mind you (stands by to get flamed) I'm also not sure that making it a degree level job has really helped. Newly qualified SWs often seem to be all theory and no common sense imo. The unqualified staff on crap pay who support families often seem to have a much better handle on things and are better at working with directly with families.

YY re Cumbria. And also, professional roles up there are very hard to fill. People don't want to go, even if there was enough money for decent services. Which there's not.

So mistakes get made, and holding doctors and social workers personally accountable instead of the system is a bad idea, because people will be even less inclined to want to fill those posts and even more children will suffer. We need systemic change, not scapegoating. None of this is to deny that there are a smattering of outright abusive professionals too of course, as you'd expect.

Ss don't touch cases until its hit severe crisis.
That's because that's what they're there for, there's a problem that early help services are also vastly underfunded which means more cases reach crisis. Also some (not all) schools absolving themselves of responsibilities (again through not being funded enough) and believing that making notes of concerns and passing onto social services constitutes safeguarding when actually they are part of the early help framework and should be taking more lead professional roles in plans to support families