Nine years for starving a baby to death

[PropertyFlipper]

I’m struggling to see the justice here. This sorry specimen will be out in five years no doubt. Devastating.
Teen mother, 19, bursts into tears as she is jailed for nine years

Of the children I work with the ones in really horrible dysfunctional families still fare better than the ones in care. We can't reach the "looked after children" at all.

@ExpressDelivery but Peter, Kaylee-Jayde and Asiah would all have been better off in care. They couldn’t possibly have fared worse

@Katiebee008

What happened to this poor baby is horrific but I wish people would educate themselves on the kinds of circumstances that lead to this.

The mother was a teenage runaway. 14 year old girls from happy homes do not just run away. There is either a history of childhood abuse, or drugs and sexual exploitation. When she was herself a child. That she was in supported housing with her baby, who she had fallen pregnant with when she was a child, and was still considered to be 'missing' by her parents suggests there was a very good reason her parents were not aware of her whereabouts. She likely had a shitty upbringing and no real role modelling of good parenting.

It is heartbreaking but there were definitely failures in keeping this poor baby safe. But it is bigger than just having an "evil, scummy, mother". It is so much more complicated than that

I know you mean well but the excuses beint made for this woman make me feel sick.

Plenty of people have abusive childhoods and leave home very young as a result. It absolutely does not explain this behaviour. If anything it makes people want to be better parents themselves, because the suffering of abuse is burned into your brain.

That poor baby. Sitting there dehydrating and starving in a soiled nappy, wondering where her mummy was gone and slowly realising that she wasn't coming back. She must have been absolutely terrified and in so much pain.

The only person in this situation who deserves sympathy is that poor child. Her mother is a monster.

So you'd have done all this partying and socialis knowing your baby was alone with no food or water, and slowly dying?

Of course not, but I'd have had easy access to help, both in the weeks and months before I got to the end of my tether and when it was reached.

@bluewanda

Of the children I work with the ones in really horrible dysfunctional families still fare better than the ones in care. We can't reach the "looked after children" at all.

@ExpressDelivery but Peter, Kaylee-Jayde and Asiah would all have been better off in care. They couldn’t possibly have fared worse

Yes of course but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

@bluewanda

Of the children I work with the ones in really horrible dysfunctional families still fare better than the ones in care. We can't reach the "looked after children" at all.

@ExpressDelivery but Peter, Kaylee-Jayde and Asiah would all have been better off in care. They couldn’t possibly have fared worse

yes and that the kind of scary judgement call over worked, underpaid, burnt out SW's have to try and make every day - often at 6pm just before they go home - having already had 5 emergencies to deal with

Of course they would have been better in care - but how do you know - and how do you know that the other kids the SW's where dealing with are alive as a result?

Baby P was so heartbreaking too.
Who makes these ' rules ' ??
Who thinks giving a child back to abusive parents is a good idea?
She was in sane mind to go clubbing and up the shops.
makes me feel physically sick , yet children can't be removed from their parents .. only after they have died , that's fine.
:(
Sick sick world we live in.
I'm sorry I feel this way , but I do.

@ExpressDeliveryIm guessing the children you work with are all still alive though right? Ime a lot of kids in care do badly there precisely because they are so horribly damaged by their families before they enter the care system. Then the system gets blamed for not being magically able to fix them.

@Panickingpavlova

Yes of course socially, we'll can't possibly try and prevent the this without understanding what the road is

I only many many young girls with unbelievable tough backgrounds will be amazing mothers but sometimes we get this.
Even the most well meaning 17 yo in a stable home may struggle to fully be there for a child??
But they may have more family support?
She didn't care for this child, was willing to risk the babies life so she could go out and have fun.
Where was the actual support for her? It sounds like a bizarre set up.
If my young teen has a baby in a few years I'd be expecting to be a joint carer with her?

She was 18 with a 20 month old, so she was 16 & 4 months when the baby was born, therefore 15 when the baby was conceived, she was in "care" and being sexually exploited.

Exactly what real support did she have? Did she have any support, whom she could leave the baby with to get a night out? Most very young mums will have some trusted family support.

She clearly needs to live with this, but i have sympathy for her she was let down. And her baby was too.

I ageee with that up to a point- it’s the most severe cases end up in care and that will impact outcomes.

Doesn’t mean the care system isn’t horrendously broken though. Guy I knew when I was at school was in care. Regularly raped in the shower by a bigger boy.

Every kid in the care home knew about it. Every kid at his school knew about it. He got a huge amount of verbal and physical abuse from his peers on top of regularly being raped. Nothing was done about it even when he attempted suicide a couple of times.

Sorry my last comment was in reply to @Porcupineintherough

she was in "care" and being sexually exploited

Oh this is one of THE most difficult things I see - young people we know are at risk of CSE and criminal exploitation but they are in care - not prison - even when placed in the middle of nowhere they run!

Even with trained workers to mentor them and counselling onsite - they refuse to engage - they wont look at things because it's scary and hard to admit you are being abused.

You can't lock kids up (well you can but you need a very specific reason, a court order and constant reviewing - which take a lot of time and money) - you can only try and protect them.

[quote Porcupineintherough]@ExpressDeliveryIm guessing the children you work with are all still alive though right? Ime a lot of kids in care do badly there precisely because they are so horribly damaged by their families before they enter the care system. Then the system gets blamed for not being magically able to fix them.[/quote]
Umm, if only that were true. I don't know of any murdered by their caregiver, but there are far too many suicides.

Thank you for posting your insights @ghostyslovesheets and for doing the job you do. I couldn't do it.

This is very sad. There will be a review but I doubt that there are new lessons to learn. social worker or workers likely had massive case loads as will their managers. Most SW want to do well by children. Also the media will generally only pick up the failures not the families that have been helped or children removed and successfully placed. These are rightly confidential but it gives a skewed impression.

It may be absolutely correct that more children should be removed early but that doesn’t just happen. It means gathering evidence of parenting for a court case and giving that evidence. It also means that there needs to be suitable carers available.

I wouldn’t have the ability to be a social worker- did some of the legal work in a local authority and that was bad enough. But also with too much work constant worry about what if I drop the ball?

Reading through this thread it takes very special people to be social workers. Thank you and I am prepared to pay more tax to fund better.

9 years out in 4

@zeddybrek

On the BBC home page there are 3 horrific stories of abuse/violence against small children and it's so hard to read. I'm going to stop reading the news for a while now. I feel such deep pain and sadness for these children it actually makes me feel physically sick. No one deserves the horrors they have gone through. These are the ones that are in the news. I imagine there are more similar cases that never get reported on. Absolutely sickening.

It's hard to live with, isn't it.

There are professionals on this thread - what needs to change, to make things such as this less likely? How, if you had unlimited powers and unlimited resources, could you reduce tragedies like this?

@RubyFowler

Thank you for posting your insights *@ghostyslovesheets* and for doing the job you do. I couldn't do it.

Thanks - I'm not a social worker - I also couldn't do their job - without outing myself I am and education worker for looked after children and care leavers - I work side by side with SW's (often as a huge thorn! )

I can understand why a young mother without the means or desire to care for a baby would give them up - even if that’s leaving a baby in the open to be found. That’s an act of desperation.
But this was an act of sustained cruelty and selfishness. Reminds me of the poor the children locked in a basement to starve to death by the Belgian paedophiles. I know the circumstances are again different but some people are capable of unimaginable cruelty.

This story is absolutely tragic. The poor baby. If only someone could have saved her.

I can't help feeling sad for the mother. A young woman with a baby at that age. I'm not sure how I would have coped.

@Mum21031608

...how the hell do you know how to be a good parent when you have no model to base it on? Trauma and abuse have huge life long impacts on people

I’m sorry, but every person in the world knows that food and drink is essential to live.

You don’t need good parent models to understand that basic fact.

I absolutely understand that ones own experience of being patented can massively impact on how you are as a parent yourself, especially when trauma and abuse is thrown into the equation.

However, this woman left her baby for 6 days with no food or water, and lied to people to cover up her tracks so people would think the baby was being cared for in her absence. She knew exactly what she was doing, and she would have known that leaving a baby to go without food or water for 6 days would have severe implications.

Maybe she didn’t think the child would die, but I find that very hard to believe.

And even if she genuinely didn’t think the infant would die, she was still being extremely and knowingly neglectful in the most abhorrent manner.

Yes. The comment you quoted is also massively offensive to survivors of appalling childhoods who have in fact become very good parents.

@the80sweregreat

I'll take the ' Simple ' approach that if you leave a child alone once for a few days then that child should be removed from its mum or dad. I can't see how anyone can think that allowing her to keep her baby is in any way right ?

What are you talking about? Babies aren't removed without evidence. The evidence came to light AFTER this poor baby was killed.

The first thing I'd do would be to pay foster carers (maybe not as carers but certainly as enhanced lodgers) to keep children until 21. Very few other people are completely on their own from their 18th birthday. Some are effectively abandoned at 16yo.

I still cannot get my head around the fact that she had left this child previously, not just for an hour or so ( bad enough ) but for days at a time and she was still allowed to keep custody of her.
She clearly wasn't making any effort and she didn't want her , yet it's so hard for anyone to make the right decisions it seems because of all the rules and regulations around child safety and taking any child into care.
Maybe ' the rules' need to change , because they clearly do not work?
There was evidence that she was neglecting her before she left her for six days.

@the80sweregreat

The child should have been removed once it became apparent she was ok to go out and leave her on her own. Why didn't they do it then? Of course, the enquiry will say ' lessons will be learnt' but they never are are they ??

You don't know whether this had been reported to social services. You have no idea what happened.

@the80sweregreat

I still cannot get my head around the fact that she had left this child previously, not just for an hour or so ( bad enough ) but for days at a time and she was still allowed to keep custody of her. She clearly wasn't making any effort and she didn't want her , yet it's so hard for anyone to make the right decisions it seems because of all the rules and regulations around child safety and taking any child into care. Maybe ' the rules' need to change , because they clearly do not work? There was evidence that she was neglecting her before she left her for six days.

Do you know that social workers knew she had left her child alone? How do you know that?