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?!

When you read the list of injuries that boy sustained, someone, somewhere, should have noticed and done something.

The only people that have the power to actually do something right away are the police. They're the only ones that can remove a child , and that's only for 72 hours.

Social workers need a court order to remove a child.

Peter was removed once , a panel (including the police) decided he could be returned home. That's despite the investigation being on going. His social worker was changed.

That's where it all went wrong. That baby should never have returned home, and as soon as another suspicious incident happened he should have been removed again. Or the third , or fourth. The police were informed about one of them , but decided to not take any action and leave it with the social worker instead.

You remove a child , a multi agency panel decides the child should be returned home because of reasons. How is that your fault as a social worker?

You call SS and the police. The police say they won't do anything and leave it with the social worker. How is that your fault as a doctor/ SW?

A lot of people also forget that removal isn't the happy ending they think it is.

There is a severe lack of foster carers, adoptive parents and adequate placements. Some placements can be as abusive or even worse than the homes the children left. Some are simply not suitable to deal with traumatised, difficult, angry , hurting children. Then you have the trauma of separation on the children. You have no idea how many of these kids desperately live their parent and want to be back home. How much they hate and resent everyone involved for taking them away. How many long to be back. How many do go back once they're old enough to choose/run away etc. The older a child is, the harder and more traumatic it is on them.

And Laming and Hodge got off scot free in this 'documentary' did they?

My LA was found to be inadequate for Children’s Services around 10 years ago. Not London. The inspection highlighted poor practice and management by senior SS staff. It highlighted the police could not be bothered to attend meetings about DC who were considered to be at risk. It obviously highlighted a lot more including members thinking the service spent to much! This was after baby P and the workload was huge.

I think it’s not individual social workers who determine workload and who needs more or less intervention, it’s senior leadership who should have a handle on this. They are paid to manage and members are expected to take needs seriously. Most ordinary people have no idea how bad it is. There’s no doubt it was an unattractive career after baby P.

I think we are still looking for someone to blame when it was understaffing and underfunding. I remember things changing when it was decided it was best to keep DCs with their family and provide support.
When someone goes to A/E now and they are left lying on a trolley, can’t get a hospital bed we don’t start a hunt for the consultant or nurse who is ultimately to blame for inadequate treatment. We accept its underfunding.
I don’t see that this is any different.

How much more work would it have taken to ascertain whether the boyfriend was living in the home or spending a significant amount of time there? It's one of the biggest flags for child abuse, and it was ignored.

There comes a point where you have to ask questions about intelligence and commitment and basic training.

This, every single time. They should never have left 3 kids under 5 ALONE while they went for dinner with friends. It was horrendous what happened to them but this would have been prevented by them looking after their kids properly. If they had been of lower socio-economic status they would have been absolutely vilified.

You could say that about every little task though. There comes a point where things get rushed. Again, the government has blood on their hands.

Lucy Letby has been found guilty of 7 counts of murder. She is being held accountable and she should be.
The McCanns are an odd lot. Most parents would not leave 3 unattended children in an unlocked apartment whilst they had dinner 80 yds away - at least none of my family would. I never understood why they did not have a babysitter, either. But most of the fault lay with the resort, which had hidden some child molesting earlier in the year, and the police who focused on the McCanns rather than looking for other (rather obvious) reasons for the disappearance.
The parents of baby P can only be described as wicked. It's unfashionable to brand people in such a way, nowadays, but they were. The social workers and the doctor made mistakes, but they were overwhelmed. And the parents did it - they are the ones respnsible.

I completely agree x

yanbu

you will notice in stories like this, social services are absolutely vilified while the parents aren't judged as harshly. Even if the social worker was under massive pressure with 40 families to monitor with no way of knowing which needle in the haystack would turn out to be a horrible ending. It's always 'why didn't the authorities stop this!!' not 'why did the parents do this!?'

additionally, people flip to the opposite side in a jiffy. 'Nosy social workers up in everyone's business getting bonuses for removing kids from loving families!!1'!1'

The point is it’s never the systems fault. Failing and overworked/underesourced systems caused this, but what always happens is that an individual or individuals are dragged through the mud and blamed, and then nothing changes. Its disgusting.

But we know there are evil people, there always will be, it's not that they're not being blamed, just that it's an indisputable fact. That's the reason we have social services. It's their job and they failed. Medical services are another line of protection, they failed. We do need to understand why they failed but for this case it won't change the catastrophic outcome of their failure. What I do think is wrong, is that individuals took the blame for institutional failure. We prefer to point at a bogeyman rather than accept that we're not willing to pay more for better services. Baby P paid the price for 'efficiencies' - no-one wants to admit that whole looking at a photo of a cute little boy - so let's blame A doctor, A social worker etc. We need a face and a name otherwise we might have to look at the kind of society we've created.

In all of these cases the first thing I hear is where were social services. This is usually from extended family members, I understand it must be very hard to realise you are related to a monster but I always think, what about the parents that harmed this child. What about extended family, did they not see the signs themselves, surely they would be better placed to notice changes.
But the blame always seems to land of external agencies. Personally I blame the scum bags that harmed the child they had responsibilities for.

Yes but then what? We blame the parent(s) . We put them on trial. We convict them. Then what? You can't stop people like this from existing or having children. So what do we do in order for the least number of children to suffer and die?

“Look at the kind of society we’ve created” - with the best effort in the world no social worker can save society from its own ills.

There has always been issues in society and there were lots of issues in previous decades but looking back it seemed people had pride before. People had ten children in a 2 bed house & they all came out looking clean and they valued education and taught their kids well, they wanted their kids to do well.

Now per Baby P’s mother you can have a baby & move a new boyfriend in a mere few months later, and he’s abusive and then you let the brother and his minor girlfriend move in.

And social workers are expected to deal with the fallout from all this dysfunction.

And you have people in government a million miles removed from all of it.

In all of it I don’t know what the answer is, but the fact that Baby P’s mother was let out of jail in 2013 shows the extent to which we have failed as a society.

Why were no notes available at the clinic?

I can answer this- hospital wards and GPs surgeries do not have an integrated system of information. I have been treated in a hospital where they didn't even have access to each other's notes in different departments, let alone different hospitals (top London hospital). I also attend two hospitals only an hour away from each other, but each one has their own IT system and when I turned up at the second one, they had no notes from the first.

GPs use about four or five different off the shelf system, they are not integrated with each other or the local hospital.

The local hospital releases results on one system (NHS app), the GP on another system.

They still send letters to each other, by post, to communicate.

Add then into notes from safeguarding, social services, and the whole thing is a mess of non-information,

Any doctor is often dependent on the person in front of them telling them their medical history, it's a recipe for disaster, including for safeguarding where people have something to hide.

So frightening.

Having gone through a serious case review as a teacher I would sadly say that the lessons learned from these cases from all agencies seems to be to make sure that the blame is laid elsewhere. It is the worst feeling to think 'what did I miss?' even when you know the child has never disclosed anything about what they were going through and there was nothing you could have reported.

It honestly makes you feel sick when you are being questioned after hearing horrific things that have happened and having to think of every word you are saying because it will be recorded and used against you if possible. There has to be a safer better way of doing this so children are kept safe.

In my experience it is the constant changing of people involved with the child and family including all agencies that leads to things being missed. If you imagine what it is like each time you have to speak to a locum GP and try to go through your medical history to explain what is happening so they can give a knowledgable diagnosis. This is what has to happen each time a new agency person is put onto a child or families case.

This is why I feel so so sorry for the last doctor to deal with Baby P.
Also she wasn’t a good fit for that job, she didn’t have the right experience and it seems to wasn’t trained in child protection procedures.

There were a number of people sanctioned in relation to Baby P including the social worker directly involved and anther doctor.

Having read more about that case I get it to a point, but it’s also hard that this shitty mother managed not only to have her baby son die on her watch, but she messed up so many other people’s lives.

@Pat888 We cannot blame all shortcomings on underfunding. People do have professional responsibility as well. When they see a dc, or indeed don’t, it’s not ok to do nothing. Not ask questions. Not have doubts. I don’t condone hounding anyone but there were individual shortcomings. We don’t accept nhs negligence. and the NHS paid out £2.8 billion in negligence claims last year. Had baby P been an adult, he would have had compensation.

I think it’s fair to say there were some shortcomings. But lots of people were trying, so hard in fact that he had 60 contacts with services.

And the mother lied and deceived, and let her awful boyfriend and his brother kick and punch her baby to death. And she left jail not even 5 years later.

You couldn’t pay me enough to be a social worker and have to deal with the shit out there.

The thing is, by focusing on an individual and their shortcomings, there's no hope in hell to actually fix a broken and fucked up system/procedures.

That doesn't mean individuals are blameless or we should ignore their actions, but there's a much bigger picture here.

Trouble is, these systems only exist to stop this sort of killing.

Most of the time they do - but when they don’t, you can just wave a murder away.

Some people can’t do some jobs. Being fired isn’t a terminal illness. Nothing to stop everyone who was let go doing something else.

I wouldn’t say they only exist to stop killing, their primary purpose is support for those struggling I would have thought.

That’s true but being blamed for the death of a baby and having your picture published constantly in red tops isn’t just being fired.