Ms Batool had blamed her husband, Urfan, for beating Sara 'black' in a series of WhatsApp messages dating to 2019, the Old Bailey was told.
Sara's stepmother Beinash Batool messaged her sister Qandeela in 2020 complaining that Sharif was 'always shouting and hitting' his child, it was said.
In May 2021 she allegedly messaged her sister claiming: 'Urfan beat the cp out of Sara. She's covered in bruises, literally beaten black.'
Batool claimed that she wanted to report Sharif saying: 'I feel really sorry for Sara' adding 'poor girl can't walk' and 'I really want to report him'.
In February 2022, she allegedly told her other sister Amima that her husband was 'beating Sara up…cos she's being naughty'.
She went on: 'Sara has anxiety, whatever she eats she vomits out…something happens to Sara I will not be able to forgive myself.'
In the summer of 2022, Batool is said to have messaged Qandeela again saying: 'I can't even cover it up. He beat Sara up yesterday and I can't send her to school on Monday looking like that.'
Sara was finally murdered in August 2023 in what would have been the school holidays if she had still been educated at school, having been being severely beaten while at school for at least four years.
Please look at the dates and how long this was going on for and how she was at school while "beaten black" and "poor girl can't walk"* *" I can't send her to school on Monday looking like that." but according to so many being at school during those four years was supposedly this great protective factor...
It wasn't.
It wasn't when I was a battered and neglected child either. I was eventually removed following an incident that exposed the conditions I was in, despite school having repeatedly punished me for what was clearly outside of my control as a child and disparaged me for my visible state and bruises.
I was then seriously abused in 'care', later returned to a still dysfunctional 'home' to be a child carer until parent died, later proceeded to be abused by my guardian, who is the father of most of my children and who I married two days after my 16th birthday, signed off by an approving social services.
No one is learning. From Maria Colwell to Sara Shariff the same communication issues, and supposed incorrect protective factors, failure to follow procedures, focus on abusers 'strengths' and overloaded SW's come up again, and again, and again.
People are trying to blame home education, hijabs, step parents, cultures, men, ... most of it is knee jerk reactions and will do little to stop the next child being tortured and killed. Abusers will exploit every weakness of any system.
Lessons will be learned, but rarely the right ones.
There are procedures that social services are supposed to, and often do, follow, when there are even low level concerns.
A child giving confused explanations of bruising is a major red flag that should alone have brought swift investigation.
Being withdrawn from school to be supposedly home educated or any other reason, following reports of bruising, should have ramped up the urgency of a home visit.
It didn't and we will have to wait for the serious case review to find out why not.
I don't want to hang blame on social services unreasonably, we only hear about what they get wrong most of the time, but there needs to be a massive review of what is going wrong both in failure to communicate clearly and promptly, failure to follow procedures, and in the positive weight so wrongly and willingly assigned by them, to some parents and why. Some things just aren't changing.
A few days ago I put my neck on the line for the 16th time in several years over the same set of children in a very dangerous situation. I spelled out exactly why and how Child Protection and the police where failing these children and what they where falling for, and how the perpetrators where so easily hiding and fudging easily available evidence, and running rings round them. It isn't rocket science but I acknowledge I'm only looking at the obvious behaviors of one family, so considerably easier for me to be focused on patterns and 'co-incidences'.
The incident I was reporting was very serious and very violent in anyone's book, leaving visible injuries and plentiful evidence everywhere.
I intervened at the time despite previous grief, and am now right in the firing line for inevitable revenge.
Lots of witnesses, but no one called the police. Everyone's given up reporting.
Not enough has ever been done. But plenty done to those who spoke up.
Too much stress has been put on the wrong things as being positives, and a lack of curiosity about patterns, evidence and the 'co-incidental' disappearance /un- availability of evidence especially on the children themselves, allowing the abusers playbook to run, and run, and run.
(The person who took my report did listen carefully and agreed it well over the threshold for intervention, but still needed to have words about my politically unacceptable use of 'cocklodger', (I just couldn't think how else to sum up what they did and didn't do within the family) and 'fat' as a physical descriptor, and asked me to find a descriptor other than fat or obese, also over another less offensive descriptor, even having tried and tried to get earlier intervention and now trying to prevent inevitable further extreme violence and threatened death of a child, policing the language of the witness was a part of their job...
I'm generally polite, but not quite PC enough, I'm too LC, not 'Naice', I'm from a tough background, but those are also the qualifications to know exactly what I'm looking at. The focus is in the wrong places.)