Baby P witch hunt

[the7Vabo]

I watched a full documentary on Tik Tok about Baby P today.

The thing I’m most struck by is that social worker/s were fired, a doctor is in permanent psychiatric care, social workers received death threats and in the middle of it all the mother receives a minimum 5 year jail sentence and has been in & out of jail since 2013.

There were clear failing but a lot of it was against the background of an overwhelmed system. In particular the clinic where the doctor worked had been flagged as dangerous to senior management by two doctors who resigned and another doctor was on stress leave. There was no access to notes at this clinic. The doctor who last saw Baby P had no access to notes, wasn’t familiar with procedures around child protection in the UK, was working without the assistance of a nurse who might have helped her. She saw Baby P for a specific reason to rule out underlying conditions that might explain his injuries. She was blamed for missing that he had a broken back but it’s not clear when his back was broken.
Her face was plastered all over the papers and she went to train stations multiple times with thoughts of ending her life, asked for her name to be removed from the register and is now in psychiatric care.

The social worker directly involved might have been able to do more but she did a lot including removing Peter, taking him to hospital, contacting the police and immediately contacting the mother when she heard she had a boyfriend.

The head of the area had serious death threats and was fired.

I know people say the different agencies between them had contact 60 times and they shouldn’t have missed it. But that also means there was a lot of effort being made to protect him.

There were reports written immediately afterwards blaming various social workers, the police and medical staff involved with the exception of that doctor seemed to get off more lightly.

The thing that floors me is the mother got min 5 years and was first released in 2013!!! It’s bloody extraordinary. I saw a clip of her speaking to social workers, she was v convincing!

I just can’t get over how a doctor can have a nervous breakdown but the mother is meanwhile out & about!!!! She back in now for breach of conditions I think. I keep thinking about that doctor.

AIBU?!

You do realise the sentence was a minimum! That means she could apply for parole. and she was actually released in 2022. Maybe if posters understood sentencing it might help. She was in prison for 15 years.

@the7Vabo you can read it here. The services involvement section is an eye opener.
While not maliciously or intentionally, that baby was failed , despite multiple agencies and professionals being involved. It IS a travesty. Even worse, his death was used as a political football and click bait revenue.

https://basw.co.uk/sites/default/files/resources/basw111257-100_0.pdf

I understand it was a minimum.

As far as I understand it she was first released in 2013 - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-62087519

She’s been in & out since due to her own behaviour.

A minimum of 5 years is too little.

She was released in 2013 but brought broke her bail conditions and was put back in prison two years later. She should never see the light of day again in my opinion, along with the horrific way that poor baby died the things she also allowed to happen to her two year old daughter are sickening.

You are right. 2 years out from 2013-15. Apologies. However I’m thinking Sen and and personality are an issue here. Parole board too lenient in 2013 I think,

I don’t think Lucy letby is guilty @TheShellBeach . I’m in America and so I read the New Yorker magazine article that was suppressed in the UK. However BBC sounds have since done a podcast suggesting the same- these very sick babies died because of systemic failures in management

The whole system was too lenient on her both before & after Peter’s death. She sounds like an very messed up individual to put it politely. She has made a fool of the system in the time she has been out.

She got away with lying and being a feckless parent before the fact and I struggle with hold much SS can ever be held responsible for that. They are human generally women who probably don’t relish the idea of separating a family and want to give people the benefit of the doubt.

It was a failing across the board. He visited that doctor with a broken spine.

They failed that child catastrophically. So I disagree it wasn't a witch hunt. It was justified anger at professionals who jobs are to protect children and failed massively.

Agree, they were the same council that failed Victoria Climbie seven years before baby P.

Child protection is hard and I think many SW lose faith in the system. I felt conflicted that we could potentially remove a nine year old who desperately loved their mum, wanted to protect her and lied to us to protect her. The mum was getting back involved with a man who beat her. I felt that this was working against trying keep the child's best interests at heart. Yes their mum was not right but the removal would mean the child would end up living with strangers, probably fucked up for life, and the mum would cling even tighter to the man that abused her, as she had nothing left now. I couldn't do it. I wish I'd seen more happy endings for the children who were removed but unfortunately it seemed if they were over a certain age, the removal left a legacy almost as bad as if they had grown up in their abusive family homes.

Ed Balls who iwas Health Secretary at the time sacked the poor woman who was head of Social services and Education for ?Essex publicly in Parliament before she had even been informed -such a big brave man - as if she could have had that much input
She was suicidal.
I wrote the above. I didn’t exactly get my facts right but reading a later newspaper article I see
The boss of Haringey Council's children's services was awarded a £680,000 payout for unfair dismissal after arguing she had been "unfairly scapegoated".
So thanks Ed Balls - I see she got compensation but that is 680,000 of tax payers money - and Ed swans off with his pension in tact.
updated info here
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-62087519

I don't think Ed Balls should have sacked the boss live on TV but I do think generally it was justified anger at professionals not doing their jobs properly.

According to the documentary it is unclear when his back was broken, it seems likely it was in the 24 hours before he died which is after he saw the doctor.

That doctor is now is psy care permanently even though she was working in a clinic that had been flagged as a risk by doctors, where the same doctors had quit because of it and another was on stress leave. The doctor hasn’t been properly trained on procedures and didn’t have access to notes.

So the whole system failed him but I can’t accept the 3 women who kept having their faces in the paper deserved it, that was a witch hunt.

Was Ed Balls her employer? He circumvented dismissal procedures. Surely? Hence she was awarded the money,

We also forget that Barker, the step father got 12 years and he’s awful!

I think if a doctor sees a child and misses serious injuries, maybe they should be disciplined as they are not competent. We do pay the NHS, police and SS to do a job. There’s always going to be an outcry when they don’t and a child dies.

Well he dismissed her on TV.

The doctor in this case seems from what I know to have made a mistake in difficult circumstances with no notes/history. What she was asked to do wasn’t easy.
People weren’t sitting on their tea break while a child died, they followed up and yea ultimately they made the wrong call unfortunately.

@the7Vabo the mother is another failure of the system. She was a child that lived in a DV household, then moved away, a violent brother who was abused by the mother. She herself was neglected and abuse was suspected. She was on a child protection register herself and recommendations were made for her to attend school in a specialised/institutionalised setting. She was taken off the CP register and pregnant at 16.

I have 2 adopted children. Our experience was that social services were concerned for a long time, but just kept adding new reports to the file. It was only when something catastrophic happened (younger one was rushed to hospital) that they took any action.

Birth parents were well liked by the sws, who gave them chance after chance. The birth parents avoided health visitor and social worker meetings for months and no one did anything.

It is astonishing imo what you can do to children before social services will act. At my daughter's nursery they call social services at the slightest hint of a problem, but thereafter it takes a huge incident for anything further to happen.

Look at those two sets of twins who died in a house fire in Sutton - the case was in the paper this week. The squalor in the house was awful, sws knew she left them on their own, still nothing.....

It was a witch hunt because specific individuals were targeted, named , hunted and put on media trial when the faults were in the system and procedures.

Why weren't the police officers and the CPS person responsible for deciding to not prosecute the two previous incidents named,shamed and fired?

And the granny was on the doc saying her daughter was a good mother but “failed the little one”, and was very manipulative not an inch of self awareness.

Letby was guilty.
She's lost her appeal, too.

She's had further charges added after her first conviction.

I know there are conspiracy theorists who think she's innocent. They're wrong.

It's vital that we scrutinise these tragic cases for weakness in the system. Thanks to the review of Baby P, social workers will now never allow a child to remain 'dirty' if they visit. They will insist that heavy creams, nutella, etc., are wiped off of the child, in case it is hiding an injury. We learn from the past and prevent in the future.

When you read the list of injuries that boy sustained, someone, somewhere, should have noticed and done something. The fact that all of the services weren't working together needed to change.

I don't think one person is responsible for Peter's death, but we can't let that stop us trying to make everything better so it doesn't happen again.

But many times, they DON’T get through the whole of A&E. People die. Things are missed which leads to horrible consequences. Sometimes “the best of your ability” still won’t save people

The Letby inquiry has not yet finished. I think she’s guilty but the inquiry might turn up more info, so we shall see.

I think the doctor was failed by her practice but there is professional capability too.

With the head of SS, the Secretary of State used to approve appointments but I don’t think the government is the employer. So public sacking wrong on many fronts. Sharon Shoesmith has written a book about the issues surrounding this case and that might be worth a read. The Labour government was populist. Of course these days it would be social media all over it.

I just think ordinary folk want to trust the police, social workers and doctors. They find it incredulous that highly trained, and sometimes highly paid, professionals get it so wrong. The Sun and others were OTT but these days they are not the only hate source.

So a good question is, let’s say you are police, or SS, or a GP for example, and you have a caseload of 100 a month, but you can get through only 50 effectively when done properly, what do you do? Do 100 jobs half-arsed or do 50 jobs well and leave the other 50 to pile up onto an already large pile? Either way, people will die.

These services are grossly underfunded. I don’t think people realise quite how bad it is. If you have a system where the majority are seen and helped in good time, then you cut the staff by a large %, people are going to die. The individuals can’t be blamed for this, the bloody government have blood on their hands.

They were all to blame an important part of their job is child protection and they didn’t protect the child.

The prison sentence is a complete injustice too.