Should we accept greater state monitoring of families in order to safeguard children?

[AllYearsAround]

This point has been raised on a few threads in reference to Sara Sharif - that the state should do more monitoring of home educated children if there's a possibility of uncovering abuse and saving a life.

But looking into it, most children killed by a parent or step parent are actually under 1
https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/research-resources/statistics-briefings/child-deaths-abuse-neglect

There have been a few awful cases recently of babies and toddlers being murdered, particularly by mums' boyfriends.

Would it not be more sensible then to put the time and money into monitoring families with young babies? We already have the system in place with health visitors.

Maybe health visitors should be a mandatory service, with regular (weekly? Monthly?) home visits and babies stripped and weighed/examined.

This would surely save many more lives than any additional monitoring of home education.

They clearly don’t understand the process of making laws.

That poor little boy who was locked outside in the cold and punished with cold water, I feel awful I've forgotten his name, but there were MULTIPLE police calls concerning his behaviour.
Safeguarding is everyone's duty, but when major Safeguarding concerns are raised we need to be following up on them!

As for nursery nurses doing "spot checks"- they're even more over worked and underpaid than the Health Visitors! And our government has gone and increased the legal ratios of how many children can be looked after by one person, like that won't lead to catastrophe.

The problem is that the state services are really overstretched and so the monitoring can be really toxic. If we had enough people to actually be kind and listen to children that would be great, but we don't. I'm fortunate that I have an EOTAS package for my DS so I do have monitoring from kind sensible people. But before I got that the contacts were awful and judgemental and traumatic for my DS.

Interesting topic. I tend to see state intervention in people's lives as something to be vigilant about and, frankly, quite problematic. Often state intervention functions as an excuse for people so they don't have to care for their neighbours.
What I think is that people should be aware of the signs of abuse and have 0 tolerance for it. Of course the state has to be there, I'm not at all in favour of the small state. What I worry about is that, with good intentions, we enable a faceless and bureaucratic institution to have control over people's lives, with victims falling through the cracks because individual people choose to "externalise" their caring.
Oh gosh, I don't know if I'm expressing myself clearly 🙏

I don't think it would be a good use of limited resources...I think more resources for targeted interventions would be better.

Having said that, Sure Start was great. It would be great if that could be expanded again.

Having a lower bar for removing children when there is evidence of physical abuse wpuld be the most useful first step. I do not have any comprehension of why abusive humans are allowed to keep vulnerable children.

If you really want to help under-5s, then best of helping their mums by reinstating and better advertising of children's centre support would be great. I saw tired mums handing over a baby for a break at ours, plus they minded the kids during various feeding or other parenting classes, signposting the church playgroups and giving a name of who would let them in free etc.

I can’t access the full stats right now but IIRC it’s not that most children killed are killed before they’re one (eg if it were 10 children, 6 or more of those would be under one). It’s that under one is the most likely age to be killed (eg it might be 2 under one’s and only 1 in every other age group right up to one hundred years old). It’s absolutely horrendous that under ones are the most targeted group but sadly the stats don’t indicate that you could hugely cut these numbers just by monitoring babies alone.

Does anyone know what the resistance is to removing children in cases of established violence like Sara’s? Is it for fear that the alternative like care or fostering is even worse?!

We already have a health visitor system though, it could just be made mandatory and health visitors given rights of entry and rights to examine children. Wouldn't even need to be health visitors, it could be nursery nurses doing spot checks on homes.

I very much doubt Health Visitors would want the additional duties and powers needed to undertake mandatory visits. You do realise that social workers don’t have powers of entry or the legal right to see any child, even one there are concerns about.

The steady erosion of social work as a profession has a lot to answer for - huge recruitment issues particularly in child protection, ever reducing resources, an assumption that anyone could do the job better and a legislative framework that ties workers hands while also holding them accountable for the safety of children being raised in complex family circumstances.

Equip social workers properly and children will be safer, home schooled or not.

@WitcheryDivine

What is it about the care system which includes fostering, that could be worse?

well one practical reason why not is childrens services/health vistors simply do not have the manpower. You were need probably four times the size of the workforce as you have now.

The other thing is i'm pretty sure it would be in direct contravention of Article 8 of the ECHR

That is what I’m asking. Are SS reluctant to remove children because they think on average kids have better outcomes in their own families even when violence is happening than they do in care? Or is there another reason eg lack of care places?

The thing is whenever a big case like this is in the news we have a few weeks of shock and horror and threads online about how people need to be monitored more, how neighbours etc should always report things etc.

Then it's back to "I don't want a HV visiting because Insert Random Reason" and it's pages of "they're not mandatory, just don't answer the door/phone" and people asking about behaviour they've witnessed or are aware of only to get "mind your own business" "it's only a snapshot, I wouldn't be judging" blah blah blah.

The fact is the services are stretched to breaking point and people don't want to pay to improve things. They also don't want to "get involved " and resent anything that makes them feel"judged" or "anxious " even when it's obviously an innocuous general visit that everyone gets, precisely to try and monitor those families where children would be in danger.

It’s just such a terrible case and I dearly hope lessons are actually learned and change happens.

In my opinion, children who are known to social services shouldn’t be allowed to be home schooled.

As someone has said HVs are in crisis as it is. Mandatory checks aren’t going the most effective use of their time.

If you are going to go on the targeted demographic route we need to look at the step parents/ mother’s boyfriend more closely. Why are these woman leaving their under 1s with them in the first place? Is it so they can go work but they can’t afford childcare? Why are they moving in with another man so quickly after having a baby? Is it because it makes more financial sense than living alone as a single mother? Single mothers need more support so they can stand in their own two feet without needing ‘support’ from a partner. Maybe they need more HV visits? Maybe they need more funding to access childcare? Family centres? More opportunities for concerns to be raised? Perhaps an automatic SW referral if a non relative adult is living in the house with an under 2.

Surely, we'd be better off spending money on preventative measures that would benefit everyone, such as better education, more robust mental health support, a solid, workable plan to end child poverty, the re-introduction of services like Sure Start, local libraries, and free toddler groups, and better housing for the vulnerable.

Women who have options via education and proper mental health care tend not to settle with violent men for long.

in my experience it is very very rare for a child not to be removed when a parent has evidently been violent towards a child. The high profile cases we read about might seem very black and white after the fact, but in the moment the facts aren't as forthcoming as they are now. I can assure you there is no reality in which a social worker would have known and been able to evidence that Sara was being violently abused and left her there. None.

In terms of neglect/other forms of abuse its complicated. A child can't be removed without permission from a judge and the threshold is high. There are also an extreme shortage in foster placements and children in care do tend to have worse outcomes than children left within family networks.

Does anyone know what the resistance is to removing children in cases of established violence like Sara’s? Is it for fear that the alternative like care or fostering is even worse?!

To even get close to removing a child you have to evidence that is no other way to provide safe care. Which means trying to engage the family in various supports and interventions and evidencing the level of risk you have concerns about. That means having access to the child and their parents/carers who can go to all kinds of lengths to avoid actually meeting with social workers. It also means having current evidence of concern, historic concerns won’t meet the threshold without evidence of current risk. There’s a reason they took her out of school.

Processes are often lengthy, frustrating and slow because the court won’t accept that you’re concerned purely because no one has eyes on the child. Oddly enough social workers can’t just walk in and remove a child. And even once you’ve gained all the evidence in the world there’s the distinct possibility the Court or the Hearing (in Scotland) won’t agree to removal.

Nearly everyone I know who works in childrens services would pinpoint the closing of Sure Start centres as a real turning point in outcomes for children in this country. A ginormous travesty the effects of which are still being felt.

The real problem here is the lack of reliable way to access all the date at once - from school, police, SS, etc. As I understand, at the moment each agency has access to their data only, with limited access cross agency. So no one can see the whole picture.

I actually read there was a system developed to create a joint unified database for each child, it was developed for 6 years and then cancelled/ erased by the Coalition Government, with no reasons given and not replaced with anything. Make of it what you will.

Parents who are abusive to the point of killing their children will find a way to escape any checks put in place.

and let me tell you most social service databases are more than lacking

local authorities all have their own databases, they aren't linked to health, police, schools etc nor at the linked to other local authorities. So if a family moved from one LA to another, their history can be lost.

She shouldn’t have been living in their care at all.

The real problem here is the lack of reliable way to access all the date at once - from school, police, SS, etc. As I understand, at the moment each agency has access to their data only, with limited access cross agency. So no one can see the whole picture.

And once you have that data you need someone with the skills and knowledge to analyse that data, understand the risks for each particular child, and to be able to work with the family. Data gathering isn’t child protection, child protection is the plan that is put in place and that isn’t one size fits all.

If you ask professionals it’s not a lack of data - we know the kids that are at risk - it’s the lack of resources which means only the most desperate actually reach the threshold.

Why? It's up to the parents to decide how their children should be educated. Home education is the default. If you want your child to go to school you have to "opt in".

But she was among the most desperate.