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?

things happening in Harringey is more newsworthy because it shows that the continual “lessons will be learned, changes will be made” spiel that happens after such an event is bollocks.

Things don’t change in a meaningful way in a lot of places. Often one person becomes the scapegoat for considerably wider problems. They leave or get sacked and then everyone pretends that the problem is fixed when in actual fact the same lack of funding, lack of training, slack policies etc etc prevail.

Are there no prisons?... Are there no workhouses?

Also interesting that one of the current PM-wannabes’ selling point is cutting tax. Which will make social care even tighter.

Having worked as a child protection social worker this is absolutely the case.

Victoria Climbie 22 years ago but Baby P was 15 years ago now. Both still relevant

Cannot agree with this more. The biggest single indicator for child abuse / neglect is the presence in the home of a man who is not the biological father and is in a relationship with the mother. Next is drugs and alcohol.

I am fed up with the suggestion, which I see all over liberal twitter, that poverty itself causes people to become so stressed that they are literally forced by a cruel Government to beat, burn and break the spines of their children.

Apololgies for double post but the Baby P inquiry also established that one of the reasons why the horrifically abused child was not taken into care was that Haringey had at the time specific guidelines preventing social workers from making decisions based on unconscious class bias. This mean that they were required to disregard such red flags as a filthy home, pet snake and rat on the loose in the home, and a child smeared in chocolate (which was subsequently found to have been a calculated ruse to hide his wounds).

Sometimes we should be more judgemental.

Another thing about Baby P (Peter Connolly) was that he was deliberately taken to several different hospitals/clinics/GP surgeries so it was harder to spot the number of issues the little boy had. No continuity and no shared notes. Systemic failure and lack of rigour in both health care and social care.

A quick look on salaries and Haringey are paying same as local authorities near me. Unless you have strong ties to area and can’t leave why would you work there when you can earn same £30,000 up north and buy a flat for £70,000 plus probably have a more manageable caseload and not the notoriety of working as a sw there.

I think the link between deprived areas and abuse isn't so much that people who are deprived are more likely to abuse their children-there are plenty of good, kind parents doing their best in difficult circumstances. It's possibly because the sort of people who are likely to do this end up in deprived areas.

People with poor anger management and impulse control-got into trouble at school, were excluded, spent more time throwing chairs across the classroom than doing any work or passing exams. People with criminal records, or who have been in prison. People who neglect their children through drug and alcohol issues which make their lives chaotic. These sorts of people will end up concentrated in deprived areas as they may well not be able to get, or hold down, even a minimum wage job.

I live in Haringey.

I accept their record of child care scandals looks appalling, I think the Social Services has a bad reputation so has trouble attracting and keeping good staff and has a very high turnover as a result, like many London Boroughs.

However from the description here, everyone in the borough is living in dire straits....it's not that bad! Yes it has pockets of deprivation (where in London doesn't?) but in actual fact it's the East of the borough that has a lot of the deprived bits, and to be fair not even all of that. Following the riots £££ was poured into the Tottenham area and there's been massive regeneration, especially around Tottenham Hale.

Following the riots in Broadwater farm in the 80s, the estate improved loads to the extent that for a long time it had hardly any crime, and there was a waiting list of people wanting to live there, believe it or not, though it's reputation got a knock round the time of the 2011 riots.

And as for the West of the borough-Crouch End, Muswell Hill, and Highgate can hardly be described as deprived!!!!

It’s a large deprived borough. I work as a nanny in the area and live on the ladder.
And when my boss had her second daughter the health visitor came once. Ticked a load of boxes looked around the house and left. My boss wasn’t on her radar as there is a such a high level of depravity in the area a nice middle class mum with a nanny was not her priority.

Overcrowding will also likely lead to more non-parent men living with children - so yes, if you have split up with dad of your eldest and are living with a new boyfriend, but also your adult nephew has been palmed off onto you by your sister as he's working local to you, or caring for your own father, or your teenage daughter has her boyfriend temporarily living with you because he doesn't get on with his mum's new partner and they can't get their own place.

Because people living in deprived are less likely to get the support for smaller issues that would eventually lead to much more serious issues.

Because children living in deprived areas are less likely to get social services intervention before it general neglect escalates into full scale abuse. Primarily because a deprived area will have underfunded social services and lack of funding for sufficient foster carers. It's really lot that complex.

Furthermore for those brought up with patterns of abuse and trauma, it's really hard to break the pattern. It's controversial and I know that a lot of people will disagree, but the people you read about in the paper who have done horrible things to children weren't born evil. At one point they could have been a child or teenager in desperate need of help that they didn't get.

I appreciate your empathetic stance but this is simply not the whole story. It's just not the case (pace Rousseau) that everyone is born good, but made bad by circumstances and trauma.

Tracy Connelly got a lot of early intervention, placed in a live-in special school, given proactive psychological and social intervention, passed GCSEs, etc. She still made a determined ploy to intentionally dupe a myriad of social workers, health professioanls, etc. It wasn't lack of intervention or help with her trauma that was the problem. SHE was the problem.

There are some people that are just plain bad. And Alicetheowl is right they are increasingly decanted to the already most deprived estates where they go on to make life miserable for themselves and everyone else.

@potniatheron Connelly didn't have intervention until she was 12. Her life was horrifically abusive before then.

Tracy Connelly got a lot of early intervention, placed in a live-in special school, given proactive psychological and social intervention, passed GCSEs, etc. She still made a determined ploy to intentionally dupe a myriad of social workers, health professioanls, etc. It wasn't lack of intervention or help with her trauma that was the problem. SHE was the problem.

That is a very rosy way of describing being sent to a residential reform school because you were told it was that or go into care. She was raised in an environment where there was sexual, physical and emotional abuse from a sickeningly young age. Being sent to reform school was not a magic wand that could fix that trauma. You say that she was the problem because you know what she went on to do later. But at one point she was just a small child being sexually, physically and emotionally abused. The child is never the problem in that situation.
That doesn’t absolve them of responsibility for things they go on to do later in life when they are adults but we have to do a better job of dealing with the trauma of children like them in future if we truly care about stopping cycles of abuse and neglect.

That doesn’t absolve them of responsibility for things they go on to do later in life when they are adults but we have to do a better job of dealing with the trauma of children like them in future if we truly care about stopping cycles of abuse and neglect.

Absolutely, and we know much, much more about the impact of trauma in childhood now - the treatment she got as a young person will have hardly been trauma informed. Even knowing what we know now it’s vanishingly difficult to get any kind of support for children who have developmental, complex trauma as she would have. By the time they reach adulthood it’s all but impossible.

While proper therapeutic support might not have prevented the tragedy of baby Peter, we can’t disregard the impact of significant abuse on his mothers ability to parent adequately.

All of these issues are interlinked, be that trauma, poverty, substance misuse, domestic abuse, poor and inadequate housing, lack of skilled social workers, community resources. And they all need funding to some degree to improve.

I don't understand why extra resources are not applied to hot spots like this.
I know money doesn't solve everything but it certainly helps if there is more support in the community

Lessons are never ever learned.

I live in an LA that failed their ofsted so badly that they were told it was only luck that had prevented a child death.

I think too many LAs have crucial issues in social care and haringey just seem to get the brunt of the media

What do you mean by some of the above

What politics and internal politics

Which SWs at Haringey have children subject to CP proceedings?

One factor may be that they're unable to use money to reduce the pressure. If you're well off and struggling under pressure, you may be able to pay for e.g. a babysitter to give you a break, or for private counselling.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that everyone who can't afford these things would abuse their children. The vast majority don't. But for some people whose reaction to pressure is to become abusive, the inability to lift that pressure might make them more likely to act on their abusive nature.

I think part of the issues is that Haringay suffers a location issue. It borders on both hackney and Islington. This means referrals often goes to the wrong place
For example, the Whittington serves both Islington and Haringay resident. However, referral are often made to Islington health and social providers in error. Due to how services and partnership are set ups, communication can be problematic.

As an example, The whittington staff are on different salaries depending on which borough they cover. If you work for Islington service, you get inner London weighting whereas if you work under Haringay you get the outer London. Therefore, people are more likely to working for Islington based services.

Mmmm, don't really care. I was also abused as a child, before and after the age of 12, I have managed not to kill my children. People can suffer horrific trauma and go on to be good members of society. Connelly managed to keep her poor traumatised brain under enough control to deliberately lie to a string of social workers and health professionals. Trauma does not absolve one of responsibility, and the traumatised person is not an automaton, who has no choice but to keep acting out their abuse unless external intervention is made. If you really believed that, then the logical conclusion would be that we should do away with the law courts because criminals have no free will and no choice but to keep acting out their trauma. It's hogwash, forgive me for saying so.

There was a lot done to Peter over the years that have not been made public, she was a monster, and so were the two guys involved.