**Trigger Warning** Title edited by MNHQ Very distressing news story about murder of 24 day old baby

[A580Hojas]

Aibu to not comprehend how it can be possible that newborn baby Stanley Davies, who had been in hospital on 3 occasions with broken ribs and limbs (if I am reading the reporting correctly) was sent back home with his parents and not removed from them by Social Services? I just cannot fathom how that could happen.

Someone is guilty of failing massively in their duty of care here (I refer to the professionals, not his parents). Unless any more knowledgeable Mumsnetters can explain to me how this might have happened?

MrsTerryPratcett

Exactly

Your tax comment

You do realise how difficult it is to get a baby removed at birth? A chaotic home life is not enough to remove a child. Whether it should be enough or not is irrelevant.

While the drug taking is disgusting, that is not what caused this. He’d have died if those two were clean as a whistle. Hundreds and thousands of people take drugs, they don’t kill babies.

Social workers can't refuse parents to take their children home from hospital!
They can apply to court for an emergency care order but that still takes a few days and the courts can say no. The threshold for an EPO is very high.
Police can take a child into police protection but again, the threshold is very high. Immediate risk of harm - and if the hospital didn't categorically diagnose the abuse then nobody could act. Hospitals rarely diagnose abuse in such a short time frame, they have to investigate medical conditions before they can say definitely non accidental or health issue.

Blaming the social worker and calling for them to be sacked without pay is vile. @awwlookatmybabyspider I see you. The perpetrators are responsible for killing this baby. Nobody else.

I wanted to know how it was possible for an infant who had been taken to hospital 3 times with major injuries was still allowed home with his parents. If we have safeguarding in place in hospitals then how did it happen?

Because only the police or a court order can prevent parents taking their child from hospital and both have very high thresholds to achieve - reliant on the hospital correctly and decisively diagnosing non accidental injury which they often CANNOT do in such a short timeframe

Ideally, every parent who uses illegal drugs (regardless of socioeconomic class) would have their child taken off them, but there simply aren't enough foster carers for that to be plausible

Prize for most ignorant comment of the thread so far goes to...

It scares me how fast people are to blame

Do they not have a single idea what life at the frontline is like ? Do they think social workers work a leisurely 9-5 and merely forget children ? Erghhhhh

To the idiots suggesting anyone who voted conservative should blame themselves, I hope you all blamed yourself for baby P, who lived his entire life in a labour government.

Ridiculous statement and shameful to bring politics into it. This guy was an evil scumbag, who you vote for can’t stop that happening.

'To the idiots suggesting anyone who voted conservative should blame themselves, I hope you all blamed yourself for baby P, who lived his entire life in a labour government.'

Quite

I hope you all blamed yourself for baby P, who lived his entire life in a labour government.

Plenty of people don't vote Labour, either

I blamed “politicians” I deliberately did not specify a colour.

I didn’t vote Labour either.

Feeling my question has been forgotten slightly in the course of this thread but thank you to Notanotman for trying to explain it.

I imagined that after all the previous tragic "lessons will be learned" cases where children were sent home to abuse and murder because of failures in our child protection systems, that procedures would have been tightened up and that medical professionals would have the authority to exercise even more caution when presented with a child or baby who has been in hospital 3 times in less than 3 weeks. I'm saying if that isn't sufficient to trigger an emergency protection order (or whatever the technical term is) then what is??

We hear all the time from posters on Mumsnet who are disgruntled about being deeply questioned about their child's injuries in A & E. So what happened here? Were his broken bones not noticed in previous admissions?

Are we not allowed to ask questions about this without fear of offending people. One of my closest friends is a senior social worker (30+ years experience) so I have no interest whatsoever in bashing the profession. My question is about the period before referral to social services anyway.

Of course humans are fallible. Aeroplanes have at least 2 people capable of flying the plane in the cockpit. I thought we now were trying harder to safeguard against human fallibility by having stronger guidelines/procedures so that the fallibility of just one or two people doesn't have such a tragic outcome.

I’m sick of the system failed them blame the system. Yes interaction should have happened but the two people responsible are the parents. They did it and they alone should face consequences.

On that note, I find it really odd people are so quick to point out he's not the biological father. Because we all know biological 'fathers' are not exactly uncommon perpetrators of harm to newborn babies.

Unrelated men in the household are far more likely to abuse children than fathers.

However in a baby this little with broken bones it baffles me that nothing was done it should have been. This little boy never knew love.

Op you keep repeating that the baby had been in hospital three times. Many other posters have pointed out that all the news reports say the child went to hospital ONCE was kept in, and sadly died of his injuries.

You seem to be questioning a hypothetical situation.

A580Hojas

What do you mean "authority" to exercise caution? They had that already. Anybody can make a safeguarding referral, anybody can ring the police if they think a child is in immediate danger.

Did this child present to A+E three times in three weeks? I didn't see that in the articles I read. The time line is really hard to piece together from what I have read. It looks like he attended hospital twice and the second time he didn't leave.

As a CP SW I don't recognise a lot of what you say. My manager has a budget for our team which she is allowed to allocate - including occasional milkshakes. I don't work overtime, my caseload is manageable, I certainly claim my mileage every month. I've been funded to do two Anna Freud courses in the past 2 years.

I'm not saying all LAs are functioning like mine and it hasn't always been so but I wouldn't want people thinking social work is uniformly awful. It's not.

I have worked in children’s services and alongside SS. There is no funding, far too many cases and our social workers had well above the ‘normal’ caseload. You see parents come in and you know it’s a horror show. You follow due process and it all takes too long, the parents lie, the families lie and when the worst happens... all the blame is laid at SS’s door.

In my LA we’ve actually run out of foster carers.

We don’t have a single vacancy amongst the 200+ recruited carers we currently employ. That means we are having to send referrals out to independent agencies who charge double what we pay in house so some director can buy a second home in Spain.

Sometimes you couldn’t make it up.

MardyArabella

Does that mean they are likely to be moved as well? In adults if we have to fund a service outside of contract (therefore usually much more expensive) they want us to look to change the placement/provider as soon as a cheaper option becomes available.

@Tess
Sometimes yes. But it's easier to make an argument for a child staying in an agency foster placement where they are settled as there are always a queue of other children waiting for the local authority placements that come up

You didn’t MrsDylan, but many have.

OP is write, this is systemic failure and frankly I think that the funding comments (whilst a very valid wider point) are a red herring.

This is a kid with multiple fractures in months. If the county only had one social worker to cover all cases, this case should have been prioritised over all others. I refuse to believe there are dozens of children in every county council in the same risk range, so it’s not a resourcing problem, it’s a problem with identifying risk and responding.

I think we do have to have an accountable child protection system, yes.

tessliketrees yes, especially when they reach 16 and suddenly everyone thinks it’s a great idea to put them in semi-independent accommodation because it’s to cheap, even though they aren’t anywhere near ready for it.

Usually though it neans children either are refused the only placements avaible because it’s too expensive and so are left being bunged from emergency placement to emergency placement, or are placed somewhere which is totally inappropriate for their needs, which exacerbates the system entirely.

There are many companies and people out there who make a profit off children in our care. I understand in many situations there’s a need for it, but after working briefly in one of these independent fostering agencies and seeing their attitudes to finding placements, I definitely to think there is a serious immorality in these companies existing.