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?!

The mother came from an abusive home just as baby P did. She's also the result of failed services. If baby P had lived he may well have grown up to abuse women or children too. The cycle goes on. I don't think there's anything to be gained from villifying the mother.

The answer lies in reducing poverty and inequality and providing services for those at the bottom of society. That's a less satisfying response than blaming an individual of course. There's a reason why most women in prison come from abusive backgrounds.

A child "saved" from abusive parents is not assured of a happy ending either - children's homes are notorious for problems - just look at the Rochdale scandal. A lucky child in care may go to a decent foster home and stay there until 16 at which point they are on their own. A more likely situation is several moves, no abuse but no one to really love or care for them, and again out at 16. It's not surprising that social workers try to avoid splitting families and sometimes get it wrong (especially when they're under so much pressure)

I suppose they were taken into care?

The mother is the result of failed parenting, as well as failed services.

But moreso, it’s the result of a failed society. Middle class kids don’t have the same risk of ending up dead or abused.

No services can fix a society that isn’t working.

I often wonder why these cases are much rarer in Ireland.

It isn't all down to poverty. My girls are adopted from a similar background to baby p. The big problem is violent /paedophile men targeting vulnerable women for their homes, their children, their domestic labour, their benefits. The money disappears on alcohol, status dogs, gambling....the women are stuck.

Often they have learning disabilities and are socially isolated.

I agree with what you say about the cycle repeating, but it is incredibly difficult to disrupt it. One in 3 adoptions break down - adoptive parents often aren't able to turn things round. I know so many adopters who have tried everything but the children revert to the behaviours of their birth parents.

It is SO hard to remove children due to neglect. There is usually a single catastrophic incident that causes social services to swoop in, while ongoing problems are simply noted in the file.

There were iirc four doctors initially at St Ann's Hospital. One quit (?) and one was on stress related leave, having noted the issues. It's possible the doctor who examined baby P didn't feel she was in a position to leave because the clinic would collapse with just one doctor. It was also implied in the documentary that she was thrilled to have a locum position at a clinic run by Ormond Street, and maybe felt it wouldn't be in the best interests of her career to leave or to rock the boat.

It remains that she failed to notice some very serious physical marks on Baby P, notes or no notes. Doctors are not supposed to rely on hints when doing a physical exam on a pediatric patient.

It's tempting to contrast the fate of the doctor with the subsequent history of the mother, but to be very blunt, this doctor dropped the ball.

The appearance of a boyfriend in the life of a woman like TC and her young child or children should always be a matter of the gravest concern. It's not just one more little thing. It's huge, and the results are so predictable it's a cliche.

Is the problem here the inability to take male violence seriously as a potential threat? A blind spot where everyone believes in some sort of happy ever after fairy tale, even when the male moves in soon after the start of the relationship, and nobody recalls all the dozens of previous cases where a boyfriend kicked, beat, or stomped a small child to death under the nose of the mother and the social services?

They aren’t- you just don’t hear as much about them.

Just watched it. The thing I find the most shocking is the corruption and cover up by great Ormond street and Ofsted. Also the use of baby p's death by the Tories to score political points. Obviously the sun's conduct being absolutely awful but being from Liverpool no surprises there.

The story of the doctor is tragic. Thrown under a bus by her employer and hounded by the press

Sharon shoesmith and the other social workers are the only ones who come out with any integrity

Yes I think so. Women are always treated much more harshly for violent crime than men, bizarrely

Apparently the serious injury she missed didn't happen until after she had seen the child - which would explain how she missed a traumatic spinal fracture while noting all the older injuries.

Apparently a child does at the hands of their parents every 10 days in the UK - most of these don't make the news or at least not in a major way. It doesn't seem newsworthy unless social services have been involved. Maybe there is different reporting bias in Ireland. Of course also a much smaller total population meaning these cases are rarer.

Or maybe there's a genuine difference. Is there the same level of poverty and deprivation in Ireland? I don't think there's the same class system there as always rears its ugly head in England.

Tracey's mother is Irish by the way

The doc wasn’t up to much, however you look at it. Incredibly and unusually in her profession, she had the integrity to resign.

As SS remind us, abuse happens in all classes and income levels.

The difference is that rich people can and do pay their way out of problems.

Uninterested mothers get nannies, drunk mothers get nannies, LD mummies get nannies, private schools refer their pupils to psych services so no Cahms fail (which SS get blamed for).

Men in work have an income that makes them less likely to look for a GF-with-a-house. Women in work sniff predatory losers a mile off.

I've often thought this, too. No-one blames the fire brigade when they fail to save lives in house fires caused by other people, and yet EVERYONE blames overworked and overwhelmed social workers (whose hands are often tied by legislation and procedure) when some nasty, abusive thug kills a child. It's totally unfair.

It’s hard to disagree with doc. But it seems she’s taking all the blame on herself, resigned, left the county and ended up in psy care. She has two children who have lost a mother. We will fill medical posts with foreign trained nurses & doctors if increases certain risks. If you emigrate from the Middle East into a deprived area in England there are likely certain things culturally you’ll need time to become familiar with. And by the sounds of things this doctor wasn’t supported in the job. If she want familiar with child protection procedures surely it’s because she wasn’t trained in them.

I’m really interested in what else you’ve said. I’m middle class as are most people I know but few of has could afford a nanny.

Is it that middle class people are less stressed? More content?

What makes a “predatory loser” (I don’t disagree with the language btw) kick a child to death?

More prevalent in deprived areas due to cycles of trauma and women who for a wide variety of reasons choose bad men.
More bad men also due to trauma and a range of other things.
Where I am based drugs are also a major issue.

IIRC the social workers involved had tried to get Peter removed but the courts had not allowed. More than once, too. This is the bit I don't understand regarding the witch hunt for the SWs. What else are they supposed to do?
I started work in Haringey just as this was happening and remember the protests outside of the Civic Centre. People were rightly angry but I don't think they were angry with the right people.

I remember the case at the time and the outcry about the professionals involved. I worked with children then and made referrals to children's services and attended child protection meetings etc. Whilst mistakes were obviously made by professionals, I remember trying to explain to friends at the time that some parents, like Peter's mother, can be very cunning and clever at covering up abuse. I feel very sorry for Social Workers. They have a very difficult job. They bear the brunt of public anger which is in most cases, misplaced. TikTok has videos made by parents who've had children removed, telling the world that social workers are evil and the children have been removed for nothing.

Quite a lot of people do manage to move past bad childhoods.
Drug addiction aside I do wonder what we need as a society to make someone like Baby P’s mother chose a different path.

So let's say as a social worker I was holding around 28 children.
There are at least a couple in care proceedings and a couple more in pre proceedings. So assessments, reports, direct work with the kids, visits every week or two.
There are a few babies who live with their young mums who might have poor mental health and poor parenting skills and low income and a risky boyfriend on the periphery and they need a lot of support and maybe you're worried about the baby's development or whether the mum is actually getting up in the morning or just leaving baby in the cot all day. That's head space, meetings at least once a month each, visits as often as you can. Liaising with other services to figure out if this baby is safe and whether safe sleep is being followed and whether maybe theres a man in the house or drug use going on.
There will be a few kids who are living in a home where there is real nasty serious domestic abuse and you're responding to incidents and trying to help mum safeguard the kids and working with police and the idva and considering whether refuge is needed or whether the children need to come out and you're visiting the kids at school too so you can try to understand what's going on at home.
You might have a family where there is organised crime involvement and the windows have been shot at or the dad or older brother has been tied up and cut with a machete and no one will talk to you hut the Police Intel is that they aren't safe and that the dad or brother has done something meaning people are after him.
You definitely have a couple of parents who are addicted to drugs or alcohol and you need to visit in the evenings to make sure the children are safe and being cared for. You also have at least one family with very unsafe home conditions and you need to see them a lot and help them plan how to sort it snd respond to calls from school telling you the kids are hungry and dirty. Sometimes they have an injury and need a child protection medical.
You probably have a child who has experienced sexual abuse from a relative and the family need support and kindness. You will also have a couple of teenagers who are always missing and being located in risky situations, being criminally or sexually exploited, and maybe a mum or a teenage girl who is at risk of honour based abuse and you're trying to manage that safely.
Tell me more about how regularly you can knock on someone's door and how easy it is to work out what the truth is when they're hell bent on Lying to you. Yes sometimes social workers don't do enough but it's very rarely because of intelligence, commitment or basic training.

Just wow.

The main things that strikes me from this is that we are expecting social workers to parent society.

A tiny proportion of society but yes that's their job. There would be no need for children's social workers if all parents were in a position to parent safely and effectively.

The problem is they are too over worked to do their job safely. That in combination with a health service that's similarly over stretched and a police service that's underfunded but also has attitude problems towards women, and there are problems

52% of children in care have a criminal conviction by age 24. So that implies the other 48% don't but it's poor odds really.

Care experienced women are 31 times as likely to go to prison as other women.

There are lots of people who have bad childhoods who never go into care of course but the statistics aren't available for them.

The upshot is that you can't just blame individuals for being evil. People who experience abuse as children will grow up with differently wired brains. They need more support than others but usually have far less.

To be very clear, I don’t blame individuals for being evil. Actions can be evil of course.

I was more wondering what more could be done?

People want to believe that there is some way we could protect every single child from this stuff. So they go hard on blaming.

And in many cases we can. But sometimes we can't. I think that is terrifying for people to face up to.