To wonder why so many child deaths seem to be linked to Haringey social care?

[bathsh3ba]

Latest case of Lily Mai St George shaken to death at 10 weeks old the day before she was due to be taken into care. Concerns raised by midwives/hospitals and seemingly over ruled by social care. Mother charged with infanticide as she was felt to not be mentally fully capable. All so sad.

But it seems to so often be Haringey in the news. Is it actually worse there or is it just that we notice the name because of the notoriety of the cases?

Add to it all any social worker looking to work there not only has to deal with the internal politics, but also it seems a surprisingly high number of social workers seem to find themselves facing child protection proceedings on their own children

In Haringey or the wider profession? I'd never heard of that.

What does deprivation actually mean?

For the hard of thinking. Deprivation often occurs in communities where people are jobless, often 2nd and 3rd generation where no one has worked, or where very low paid work is the norm. Housing is either council housing or low quality social housing. People relying on food banks for food, clothing exchanges for clothes, not enough money to pay for essentials.

Benefit levels may look the same across the country but are barely subsistence level. You may not get enough housing benefit to cover your rent, if the kids need shoes, or your fridge breaks down, or you have someone in hospital and need to visit, or whatever life brings in you find yourself going into debt to pay for bus fares, or a second hand fridge. And that comes out of the little money you get on benefits.

There are whole communities of people not even remotely keeping their heads above water, the “heat or eat” question is one they gave up on years ago. Kids without food, without clothes, parents who struggle from one moment to the next.

Until we recognise poverty for the safeguarding risk that it is, and actively work to lift children out of poverty, children will continue to die. It’s really that simple.

@Cantaffordnotto the social worker who whistle blew in the baby Peter Connolly case was investigated for her own parenting by Haringay after the social worker reported the Connolly family for issues such as neglect child rape sodomy etc the council turned on their own social worker calling her parenting into question instead of sorting out that depraved family they refused to as they couldn’t take 6 children into care there wasn’t the budget. The social worker was exonerated and never worked again in social work

To be fair to Haringey, it was neighbouring Enfield who outright rejected the first two referrals made by the medical team. They then rejected a third referral because the had couple moved to Haringey.
Haringey obviously did not move quickly enough on the case but they were taking action. Had Enfield investigated or acted when the case was first referred, it might have been further along by the time the baby was released from hospital and that might have made all the difference.

I get why people living in deprivation would be under intense pressure and on the edge. I don't get why that would lead you to resort to systematic physical or mental abuse of your children. Plenty of families live in extreme poverty and manage not to kill their children.

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This is an interesting contrast to a thread a few days ago criticising social workers for action rather than inaction. Including a few responses from the usual suspects who have ‘a friend’ whose kids are ‘their world’ but somehow got unfairly targeted by social workers to the point they had to go to court, where suddenly the completely innocent ‘friend‘ was able to ‘blow them out of the water’.

They really can’t win.

Thank God I don’t do their job,

I get why people living in deprivation would be under intense pressure and on the edge. I don't get why that would lead you to resort to systematic physical or mental abuse of your children. Plenty of families live in extreme poverty and manage not to kill their children.

Plenty do, many parents manage to care for their children despite poverty however, for those who are already not coping, the psychological impact of being utterly trapped in it can lead to taking it out on the kids. Especially when kids are asking for things parents know they can’t afford, like regular meals.

Throw in poor parenting experiences of their own, trauma, poor mental health, substance misuse and any one of a hundred other things and children become very vulnerable indeed. Add in the stigma of poverty, the stigma of social services involvement and the judgement of some professionals, the media and wider society and seeking help becomes pretty challenging.

The vast majority of people don’t kill their children, the vast majority of parents don’t abuse their children, but the vast majority of kids who are abused live in poverty.

@StepAwayFromGoogling it is also possible because it becomes much harder to see the wood for the trees so to speak. So let's say in all areas, 1% of parents are deliberately cruelly neglectful. However when there are lots of kids whose parents try their best but still struggle to clothe, feed, appropriately care, it is harder to spot the ones who are actually at risk of being horribly abused. The social workers are also potentially very busy trying to support families where there are issues of parents struggling to cope due to financial issues, lack of support but who ultimately care for their kids so they have less chance to spend time contemplating that case where maybe something really sinister is happening.

This is all really interesting, thank you for the thoughtful comments. I'm not a Londoner but I knew it was a deprived area - surely other areas are deprived as well though. I briefly had an admin role in child protection but in a much less deprived area and a year reading about those cases and hearing about them at case conferences was bad enough. I honestly don't know how social workers do it.

The vast majority of people don’t kill their children, the vast majority of parents don’t abuse their children, but the vast majority of kids who are abused live in poverty.

I’m sure there’s a correlation broadly, though a read through the NSPCC’s serious case review repository doesn’t overly indicate family poverty as a particularly unifying distinguishing factor. What most of the cases do have in common are things which seem to have become politically incorrect to highlight: children resulting from unplanned or ill-considered pregnancies in short relationships, children living in dysfunctional households and broken families - and in particular children living in a household with an adult who wasn’t their bio parent, long recognised as one of the biggest risk factors for a child. Just as fear of accusations of racism or ignorance of minority ethnic cultures dissuaded social workers from taking adequate professional curiosity towards Victoria Climbie and the Rochdale / Telford grooming gangs, I believe it’s fear of appearing judgemental or “too middle class” which results in too many social workers being reluctant to give sufficient attention to chaotic homes with multiple new partners coming in and out, poor decision making by the resident parent, repeat pregnancies to new men and so on.

Social workers are broadly middle class, broadly white, broadly liberal and left-leaning. And especially when newly qualified, not necessarily well-equipped or confident enough to probe difficult situations because they fear being told they’re prejudiced.

Child death rates will always be higher in densely populated, highly deprived areas of big cities. Not unique to Haringey (where I used to live).

This answer is spot on. Deprivation and child poverty is a massive issue here.

As for why it's always in the news, Haringey is a Labour-controlled borough so if anything bad happens majority right-wing MSM is over it like a rash. That's not to say the exposure isn't deserved and in the light of Baby B and Victoria C and all those other cases Haringey absolutely should be held to account for not learning lessons, but cases of children slipping through the SS cracks happen all over the UK, they're just not reported in the same way.

@Youaremysunshine14 absolutely. Nick Ferrari was banging on about the case this morning and could barely conceal the 'all social workers are useless' trope.

The whole system needs to be abolished. SWs arent responsible for all of societies ills. I'm sick of hearing how they are meant to fix them. They can't. No SW will change the cycle of abuse but the abuse is a systemic failure.
Sure start centres were amazing places gone. Wheres the grass roots support and education gone.
There are many many councils struggling not just because people are poor but because the whole system is run on fear and blame

Social workers are broadly middle class, broadly white, broadly liberal and left-leaning. And especially when newly qualified, not necessarily well-equipped or confident enough to probe difficult situations because they fear being told they’re prejudiced.

I can say pretty definitively that that is not the case in Haringey or the neighbouring boroughs. Social workers around here are a very diverse bunch. I’d go as far as to say that the majority (maybe up to 75%) of the social workers that I deal with are from minority background.

Whatever the reasons are for this, in this part of North London, it’s definitely not that the social workers are drawn from a white, middle class, liberal elite that is out of touch with the community they serve. That is not my experience at all and I interact with Haringey social services a fair bit.

Shrodinger’s social worker - failing to protect children while simultaneously removing too many children - they can’t win

social work is struggling to recruit- why would anyone choose to work there?

41 cases - I think the safe number is 15!

the system is breaking under the strain of underfunding and burn out

Fair enough, I do imagine experience differs depending on involvement. I worked with Homes for Haringey for five years and our staff were frequently involved in the housing aspects of child welfare cases. There seemed a genuine reluctance from a significant proportion of social workers to address dysfunctional and risky family circumstances, and a sense that they had been taught in training to treat these families as having “different” but equally valid lifestyles, and that they needed to overcome their own ingrained prejudices about those family circumstances rather than acknowledge them as the risks they were.

And that isn’t blaming social workers, btw. Most of them were hugely overloaded with cases and paperwork and doing the best they could in a broken system. But the same “lessons learned” exercises, all over the country, seem to come up again and again, all too often indicating that many social workers for whatever reason aren’t giving enough professional curiosity to situations where they fear being accused of racism, cultural ignorance, or other prejudice.

Bear in mind also that a child death or suspicion of social work failure in Haringey automatically has higher news value because of the previous scandals, so will be more likely to be reported and publicised. I have no idea whether it actually has a high rate of child deaths through abuse, but reporting plus confirmation bias could easily make it look like it did even if it didn't.

It often means a family history going back several generations of poor parenting, exacerbated by low educational achievement, unemployment, little understanding about health and nutrition, often linked to drug and alcohol misuse, poor relationship experiences, violence and abuse within family settings. It becomes a cumulative tsunami. Almost impossible to disentangle and break the cycle if you are a social worker/teacher/GP. Where would you start? Education, housing, parenting skills, financial support, detox? Unless you have seen how some people live their lives it is impossible to imagine it if you live in a comfortable clean home with reliable electricity, decent food, clean clothes, beds etc.

Social workers are broadly middle class, broadly white, broadly liberal and left-leaning. And especially when newly qualified, not necessarily well-equipped or confident enough to probe difficult situations because they fear being told they’re prejudiced.

I think social workers coming into the profession later in life don’t tend to be middle class but the insistence of a degree brings in a lot of young people most of whom don’t have the experience of the kind of challenges families working with social work face. A newly qualified social worker now can be a 21 year old with no experience of having a long term relationship much less parenting children, which can make it very hard to challenge what they see constructively and with credibility.

You also can’t understand the impact of service users who will happily make accusations of racism or discriminatory practice if social workers are getting too close to the issues at hand. While it’s easy to say they should just press on, an accusation can be career altering for the worker going through investigation etc while a new worker is allocated to the family and the whole thing starts again.

Where case loads are so high there simply isn’t the time for relationship building with families, which often is the mechanism for properly understanding the risks inherent in the family. Young people particularly need a solid relationship before they’ll disclose what’s happening at home because they need some sense of secure relationship before they blow the whistle on adverse home life. Services and systems aren’t staffed to provide space for relationship in the absence of evidenced risk, and so it goes on.

Going back to this case. The baby was ten weeks old she had been home from hospital less than one week. Its totally tragic that none of the staff were listened to.

I wonder if there are areas where because of history, good social workers will not consider working there, so it becomes a vicious circle. Probably there are jobs in better boroughs.

I live in Haringey.

Due to having dc with disabilities, I have had plenty of dealings with Social Services especially The Disabled Children's Team.

I understand the funding issues etc etc but personally I have found social workers and managers within SS to blatantly ignore even the LA own policies and procedures.

I can't get my dc a social worker as we don't meet the criteria. The criteria isn't abour their disabilities but there are no Child Protection issues.

The entire infrastructure is breaking down.
Years of poorly managed services. Over paid directors and managers, lack of government funding, deprivation, groups of the population being particularly transient etc etc

Its sole destroying.