Sara Sharif case - update - horrifying

[amIloud]

This case is just beyond the realms of horrifying,

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgl461xwg3do

This poor child.

Surely the answer would be yes as she would still be alive and we would not be having this conversation

Yes absolutely it would have been better for her to be adopted than given to Sharif.
But there also could have been other options and she still would be alive and we would not be having this conversation.

Yes but presumably there is a difference between signed off on and actually doing the work?

The Guardian article from which Tandora quoted the excerpt (which you just quoted) had reported that the social worker was inexperienced. The writer of the Guardian article had actually read the whole of the social worker’s report.

The article made clear how that social worker’s report failed.

If it was signed off by a more experienced manager, then it was still a faulty report and presumably the manager signed it off without checking all the facts available to them.

This does matter very much.

The judge praised it, suggesting he either did not know what was missing in it, or is a careless judge.

She'd have been better off with adoptive parents than the bio mum too.

Well yes, particularly as their other son saw what was happening to Sara and did nothing to stop it.

I'm sure the grandad seems affable, but I remember reading that the guys Urfan Sharif worked with thought he seemed a nice guy, so that means nothing. Some people are "Street angels, house devils"

I suggest Urfan has a personality disorder as in his words he lost it. Not making excuses at all but I am always very interested in what creates these monsters . Is there any clue in his history that can help us learn more about preventing such cases in the future.

Is there any clue in his history that can help us learn more about preventing such cases in the future

Don’t hand children into the care of men who have a long history of police contact due to allegations of serious violence against women and children.

When Sara and her brother went to live with Urfan the family was living in a 2 bedroom flat and already had twins with significant additional needs. It meant there was then 4 children and 2 adults in a 2 bedroom property.

Urfan and Beenish then quite quickly had a further 2 children and moved the Uncle in increasing the number of people there to 9!

Ironically the abuse seems to have ramped up once they were moved to the bigger house. Perhaps Sara had played her part in getting them rehoused. Perhaps they had more space to hide what was going on from neighbours. Whatever it was, the whole set up and history of the adults was just so far off being a suitable place for the children to be.

The guardian article says the social worker was two years qualified, though it's unclear how long they had been working in child protection. Two years of practice isn't considered inexperienced in most local authorities, CP teams are commonly staffed by newly qualified workers, there aren't many experienced workers who will put up with the working hours/conditions of those teams.
The managers typically oversee 150-200 children on their teams; they spend most their days chairing back to back meetings and signing off reports is usually done in their own time at home. Cursory glance at the analysis section is about all most get. The managers read what's there, they don't have time to question what might be missing - they're reliant on the viewpoint & information the social worker is giving them.
I remember managing a team and our director quizzing why our supervisons weren't thorough enough - I pointed out that the amount of time alloted to supervision actually worked out at 3mins per child per month, including typing it up. That was assuming we jumped straight into case supervision and didn't bother to ask the social worker how they were... If you actually quantify the work, the numbers don't add up at all, but no one in power will recognise and accept that. When people say it's an impossible job, they're really not exaggerating. The service that exists runs on goodwill and burnout, and it's why it's rare to find a child protection/court social worker with more than 5 years practice in that area.

I do believe a lot of the serious mistakes in social services are caused by underfunding and stripping the service to the bare minimum.

I grew up in a different country and we had social services involvement as children.

I remember our social workers actually spending time with us, taking us out the house on day trips.

From my understanding this doesn't happen in the UK.
.

The Guardian article is interesting:

• “inexperienced” social worker trope - so we can already see the council pulling rank to blame the lowest paid workers which may absolve the judge…

• further confirmation that Olga was abusing the kids, she accepted a caution for biting one of them. I believe this would have been the only progressed offence against the biological parents prior to the murder. Does anyone else find it notable that both Olga and Batool bit the children judging by the caution, and Batool’s refusal to provide bite marks? I wonder if getting the women to bite the kids gave some sort of pleasure to Sharif. People don’t commonly bite children after all, it’s a niche form of abuse.

Also the children being kept with the grandfather is concerning and utterly sad. The same grandfather that lied to Pakistan police about seeing the adults/kids after they fled the UK. This led to the children going through a stressful fugitive chase from house to house in the unfamiliar environment of Pakistan - the grandfather wasn’t acting in their best interests. He could have kept them safer by giving up the adults!

Plus the grandfather condemned batool’s actions but we know Sharif confessed to the murder and the majority of abuse. So the grandfather stating he is innocent must be crushing for those children. Completely ignorant to what they experienced and witnessed at the hands of Sharif.

@Wimberry thanks for sharing an inside perspective. It seems to ring true. I believe the social worker had been employed for 9 months at the time they wrote the report, so in their first year of service.

further confirmation that Olga was abusing the kid

🤦🏼‍♀️

Jesus Christ, there was everything going on in that household - so they also had twins with additional significant needs, were they being abused too? That’s even more heartbreaking if so.

The more I think about it, I have a suspicion that Batool & Sharif’s children were treated better than the children from his previous marriage. Maybe there was also an element of Sara and her brother being “othered” in that household. The way Sara seemed to be singled out for abuse might have been because she wasn’t considered part of the family unit.

Batool never mentioned Sharif abusing the other kids in her text messages to her sisters, did she?

@sre123 I think in the UK, the people at the top see the numbers and think 'i had a caseload of 30 in the 80s, so they've got 25 it's fine'. But the complexity and the amount of work required (eg since moving from paper files with brief handwritten notes to electronic with teams of reports to complete) is huge.
When I started in practice, cases of sexual abuse were rare, and only held by the senior social workers usually. When I last managed a team, every single person on the team had at least one sexual abuse case, including those just qualified. When I started I had mostly 'child in need' cases. Nowadays, the families that I worked with at that level would be with 'Early help' teams, and almost all the work on the social work teams are child protection and court level. Technically child in need is still a social work, not family support, role but the thresholds have shifted a lot.

While I don't know social workers who take children out for the day, I do know plenty who spend a lot of time with them and take them out - but it's invariably those who are working 20hrs+ of unpaid overtime a week to get it all in, hence the good ones leave and go to roles with a better work life balance. It's really sad that we give safeguarding such low priority here, and the consequences, as in poor Sara's case, are horrific.

@Wimberry how do you think the social work team involved with this family might be feeling now? I assume morale is pretty low with the media spotlight. I hope they’re being supported by leadership but I also assume it might be an opportunity for people to be thrown under the bus.

But you repeatedly refuse to be drawn on what these 'other opions' are. There were only two other options. Living with her mother or remaining in the care system. The first was clearly unthinkable and the second almost always results in long lasting trauma and poor outcomes by just about every measure you care to use for the child, compared to children not in care for all or most of their childhoods. Being in care will always be 'better' than being left with horribly abusive parents but it's very rarely better than early adoption.

@Anonymousess it's hard to say, in my experience the absolute worst feeling and low morale is when there's news of a child death, even if it later turns out to be unrelated (eg natural causes but it's a family who is open to the service) I can't really comprehend what it would be like to know of a child death at the hands of a family member, and fortunately I've never been in that position. However I think all workers worry about being made a scapegoat, I know looking back at my own practice, despite being (I'd like to think anyway) a competent and thorough social worker, it would be easy to pick holes in my practice because the workload was so high - everything rushed, sometimes things not written up well or written up months late, visits done when tired, times I didn't question as much as I should have, etc.

I've known workers who have been involved when there has been a serious though less serious incident (eg a child assaulted, leading to a multi agency review of practice) and in most cases they've left the profession and moved on to an entirely unrelated career. The stress and guilt for the child is immense, and at the same time you're doing a thankless job for good but not amazing pay (social work now is typically around 40-45k in my part of the country) and more importantly, usually sacrificing time with your own family. It tends to leave people re-evaluating what they're doing, understandably.

Definitely not. The poster above said it works out that there is 3 minutes to spend on each child per month including typing up notes and being debriefed. Sounds good where you were. I'd have benefitted from that myself.

@RailwayCutting just to be clear that's what our supervision schedule technically allowed as managers, for that all important reflective supervision. Social workers had more time with families, but certainly very pressured. A lot of tasks that you would want social workers to do - direct work with children, spending time with families - either didn't happen or would be delegated out to non qualified staff (family support)

Shall we just agree to disagree?
i find your assumptions extraordinary, but you are committed to them.

However I think all workers worry about being made a scapegoat

I feel for the social worker responsible for that report, I really do. But she or he really does need to be held professionally accountable for his/ her professional mistakes, as does the supervisor/ more senior management, the judge in this case. That report was extraordinary in light of the facts. It was wildly irresponsible / inappropriate and a terrible error in professional judgement. There needs to be accountability and learning from this. This isn’t scapegoating.

This isn’t just about caseload it’s about systemic gender bias in the system and it needs to be addressed head on.

He’s been abusive for many years though. The abuse of Sara was over years as well. The ‘lost it’ argument just lets him off the hook.

She was the family punching bag, and they got so used to her being the punching bag that they were surprised when her poor broken body couldn’t take it anymore. Remember he thought she was faking it when she couldn’t get up after the last time and he hit her some more with a stick.

It’s a familiar pattern across many killed children, including baby Isabella Wheildon, who was stamped with the force of a ‘horse’s kick’ as reported yesterday, and yet her mum and mum’s boyfriend thought they could magically bring her back to life with CPR.

Totally agree