To think this is absolutely horrific?

[cruzrack]

Cannot believe I'm reading this...

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/dad-injects-heroin-toddlers-help-25356048.amp

One of the worse things I have ever read

One baby was born addicted to heroin - that alone should have been enough to remove the children.

Even though both parents were clearly using drugs, the protection plan ended??

WTAF??

Small mercies this was caught before one of them died. The guts that sibling had for telling. They saved their lives

So bloody sad and unnecessary that those children suffered for so long.

Lessons learned, no doubt.

That is truly horrific, the professionals involved had multiple chances, and those poor babies deserved more, the fact another child of the father speaks volumes. Horrific for all the children involved, and the professionals f*d up

@Rosiedaisy85

That is truly horrific, the professionals involved had multiple chances, and those poor babies deserved more, the fact another child of the father speaks volumes. Horrific for all the children involved, and the professionals f*d up

Apologies another child of the father spoke up, speaks volumes. I don’t know how to edit

Shocking.
Poor children.
I have worked with children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and drug abuse in the home. It is extremely sad and these children do love their parents who constantly let them down.
Let’s hope that the rest of their childhood means they are safe and secure.

😪

Poor kids. I hope they are much safer and happier now. It’s horrific but unsurprising when for some reason currently more focus is often spent trying to support neglectful parents and keep families together than on removing children from bad situations.

Every day those children were left in that situation caused more long term damage that social care, foster, adoptive parents and wider society will need to try and reverse. Imagine being a young child and seeing your dad injecting your baby siblings with drugs, your parents committing GBH on eachother and talking about suicide. Then imagine telling social services and being left in that situation for many more months whilst they fanny about trying to support your parents with parenting classes?

The bar for removal is set far too high and this is why I go when I see posts on here from people who’ve had kids removed claiming they didn’t do anything, their house was just a tiny bit messy etc.

A late friend of mine used to foster straight from the hospital new born heroin addicted babies.... The terrible mewling cry is something i hope I never ever hear again... 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢

I teach in an area with a high level of social need. Things that I would consider unreasonable are not a cause for concern by my social services colleagues. The phrase we hear time and again is "good enough parenting", very often about things that are not good enough in my opinion (and I'm not a show-home, cooking from scratch twice a day kind of parent).

We need more social workers; those who do the job need better support and working conditions (the fact that so many in this case were on long term sick leaves says a great deal); we need them not to be seen as the enemy but of people who want to work with families who are struggling. But we also need a system that will look after the interests of the children, which I'm not sure it always does.

Just my own opinion but there is a whole “child protection” industry in both the public and private sector and it would seem to me that no one will act unless they all act. For instance, SS are aware that the police are involved so they both expect the other to act. This enables them to justify not removing a child because, well you know, we were acting with the family and reports were being done and the case was being reviewed. All agencies involved pass the buck. The child(ren) should be removed and then there should be an investigation.
The process should be streamlined and more efficient and the child’s welfare and not the parent’s, made the priority.

I would also like to add that parents who need support don’t receive it whilst some families have every support and resource thrown at them.

This comment stood out to me.

Criticisms were levelled at social services in the review, including that too much emphasis was placed on supporting the parents with their addiction and mental health needs and not enough on the reality of life for their children.

I think Social Workers have a very difficult job, judged for removing children and not supporting parents to improve, or judged for supporting parents and leaving children at risk. If anyone was to make a comment here about sterilising the parents to be certain no more children could be born into that environment there would be many posters who disagreed with that but I cannot put the rights of the adult ahead of the rights of children in this situation and there were four children mentioned in the news report. I don't believe you have the raw materials to make a decent parent if your starting point is teaching them it's wrong to inject children with heroin.

As a society we need to be very clear and certain about our priorities. Where children's safety and well being is at risk the adults in the situation should always be a secondary concern. People may be so damaged by their own upbringing they struggle to parent well but my sympathy for that would never take a higher priority than the safety of children.

At the bottom of the page linked in the OP there were several other stories about horrific abuse of children, it makes me sad and angry that we keep "giving the benefit of the doubt" to people who have proved they are not fit to parent.

@Elderflower14

A late friend of mine used to foster straight from the hospital new born heroin addicted babies.... The terrible mewling cry is something i hope I never ever hear again... 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢 😢

Fucking hell I hope I never hear that sound in my life

@SleepingStandingUp

Small mercies this was caught before one of them died. The guts that sibling had for telling. They saved their lives

Siblings can tend to speak up when the younger ones are being abused, not so much for themselves.

milions/billions needs to be put into the social problems. That means less for 'deserving' people. Because what do you do with the druggy parents - well prison would be best but that costs a fortune and achieves nothing until prison has mental health and education and other support facilities so that they are changed when they come out. And well funded homes for the DCs. It also requires more police to stop the drug selling etc I think I'd like to see more invest there. Or decriminalise the drug takiing and put all the money into support. But doing everything half arsed isn't getting anywhere.

"This enables them to justify not removing a child because, well you know, we were acting with the family and reports were being done and the case was being reviewed"

But the case reviews are held in front of a judge and it's the judge who decides if it's time for removal. I have sat in case conferences were the judge has said that the SW is acting too slowly and removal should have taken place.
I'm wondering if Covid court etc lockdowns have added to this case. But ultimately it has been a case of the professionals failing to act in the children's best interests.

If parenting fails often the child is damaged before anyone notices, so that's were 'good enough' parenting has to be applied, so no further harm is done by removal.

@QueenofLouisiana, can you give some examples?

I’m specifically mentioning the time it takes before it gets in front of a judge.

I've been told by someone who was trying to adopt that it's not just the social workers or the police but the courts that make it so difficult to take children away. The belief that children are better off with their biological parents seems to trump everything. Also the 'rights' of the biological parents to 'be able to prove that they can get it right just drags on for so long even when they've shown they cannot parent adequately or even safely.

There has to be a balance but I think it's gone too far in the favour of the parents over the children. The media don't help as they always highlight the sadface parents fighting to get their children back as if social services just do it for fun.

"The process should be streamlined and more efficient and the child’s welfare and not the parent’s, made the priority."

Policies are made on the back of research. Some categories of children, not the ones in the OP who are at risk of death, but the neglect cases, don't do any better in our fostering system. Which is why we adopt the 'good enough' threshold. The SWs know what foster placements are available and often the children are at risk within the system. We can't magic up long term foster placements. Our society has slipped into deprivation and poverty as being the norm for whole sections of society. As well as people just being told to get on with physical and mental conditions. So we've accepted as a society that it's ok for children to be harmed by government policies and the conditions that people live in and under. Families are struggling and it was never the place of SS to eliminate poverty or judge parents on how they have to manage within what they have available.
It seems simple to people outside of the system.

Yes it is awful but this is the Britain we live and that 40% of the population vote for. If you voted for Tory austerity and you still vote Tory you are presumably supportive of this happening.

Am sick of the hand wringing afterwards instead of people focusing on stopping it happening, this happens because there is insufficient investment in social work. There are too few social workers, nowhere to send children anyway and no services to help parents get off drugs/alcohol.

You get the social work system you pay for.

I have firsthand experience of children in terrible situations, it is dreadful and the only way you will stop it is serious investment in helping them. It takes a) money and b) staff.

I know many will disagree with me strongly but when children are a financial commodity then this will continue to happen.
Supporting drug addicted scary parents at the expense of the children should not be acceptable.

Aren't the courts unwilling to take children away because the care system/ children's homes have a very poor outcome.

People also need to recognise that social workers are carrying maybe triple the recommended case loads. Imagine spending every day of your working life not just reading a story like this but actually in there, seeing the children, getting to know them, walking into their substandard homes - and knowing you can do nothing about it.

Then your colleague goes off sick (with stress, totally understandable) so your caseload is added to.

They work so hard, and there is nothing they can do to help people, and they are vilified by people who have never done a job anything like it in their lives.

People want magic solutions. Anyone using the word 'streamlining' and 'efficiency' can fuck right off.