To think carers should be jailed

[InBedBy10]

That man who threw that poor child into the alligator enclosure is said to be severely mentally disabled. He was out with 2 carers who clearly weren't watching him when this happened. Witnesses have said they were on their phones. AIBU to say they should be charged for this incident?

To be honest this is not the first time i have heard about carers being totally negligent and getting away with it. Instead the care company they worked for was sued. Which will probably happen here. But i think its totally wrong that the people directly responsible can walk off into the sunset with no repercussions. There needs to be more liability put on people in this position.

As a nurse myself but previously à carer, I think it’s unreasonable to blame the carers without background info. Like with your own children- you cannot physically watch them and pre meditate what they are going to do every second- hence you see kids in a&e with broken bones a lot of the time! Should all parents be prosecuted for neglect if this was the case?
I remember working with a mentally ill patient once who was deemed high risk- I was in a side room with him by myself on ‘suicide watch’. He had been risk assessed, but yet still managed to disable the call bell alarms and barracade me in the room within seconds! I was attacked and really hurt and lucky to be alive, and not once was I blamed for his actions.
in this case, the man would have been risk assessed and deemed safe enough to be in public eith x2 carers. It only takes a split second to pick and chuck à child over a bridge into the enclosure- if one was walking in front of him and one behind, it could quite possibly have been just a horrible accident that happened in seconds-
not leaving much time to react! Also, there are rules around restraining people etc!

I don’t understand why so many posters are saying we don’t know the situation.

We don’t know the full details but we do know:

-Carers were responsible for a significantly mentally disabled man

-They made the decision to take him to a public place where there would be lots of young children

-While they were responsible for him, he not only got close enough to a toddler to physically harm him but the little boy may die due to the severity of his injuries

So I think it’s completely reasonable to conclude based on what we know that the carers should be held responsible for this incident. You don’t need training to know that a significantly mentally disabled man should be kept away from vulnerable young children he doesn’t know in case he harms them.

Ha! Bit of a climb down from "Jail them!!" to 'There should be due process followed by a punishment if someone is found criminally liable".

Now you're basically saying that we should just follow the law. Erm... Yes we should! But since none of us have the faintest clue yet what happened or why or if it could reasonably have been prevented from happening or how, your post seems a slightly OTT and support-worker-blamey way of framing things if you think we should just wait til we do indeed know if they or anyone else is to blame!

We don’t know the full details but we should jump to a conclusion anyway?

Don't be silly.
We don't know anything about the man's disabilities, previous behaviour or risk assessment.
We don't know who made the decision to take him to a public place.
And we don't know what the carers were or weren't doing.

yes I’m with you. It’s unclear whether the carers are at fault but if they are, prison may not be an appropriate punishment in this case.

The OP is very unreasonable to assert the carers should go to prison without knowing the facts at this stage.

Do we know enough about the facts to even begin to draw the conclusions the OP has?

This is completely the wrong conclusion based on completely flawed 'knowledge'.

We don't know what level of responsibility the carers had for this person.

We don't know who made the decision to take him there or what risk assessments were required or done.

We don't know what training was necessary or done to care for this man, or what assessments were necessary to determine that. And it's absurd and offensive to make a blanket decision that people with severe mental disabilities should be kept away from children they don't know due to the risk of harm to the children.

Firstly, we don't actually know the exact circumstances so it's impossible to say at this point.

Secondly, who is going to be doing a barely minimum wage job with that much pressure on their shoulders? No-one

I don’t know. I saw a story in the news today about a kid who was kidnapped from a park with his mum stood feet away. Terrible thing happen in the blink of an eye. Humans are fallible.

This is also a shite thing to post when you have NO idea of the details. Those carers will have been on minimum wage and now they’re presumably out of work, and they have fools online calling for them to be charged with a crime.

Facts first…

But if they have accepted that job IF they were scrolling on their phones and not supervising him then of course the care company and the individuals are directly responsible for NOT providing an appropriate and agreed level of care.

BUT this needs to be established in a court of
law.

I don’t know the facts but very often there is a minimum allocated level of care and some do their job well and some don’t.

I’m afraid that doom scrolling is the issue. I took my young adult daughter wildlife watching last night (she’s bright and able and this was at her request ) but she couldn’t cope with the quiet or gently reading a book and looking with binoculars on - we had to wait 2 hours she was doom scrolling the entire time and when the fox and their cubs did arrive she didn’t even see them until I nudged her as she was too busy on her phone. She was on her phone for the 2 hour drive there and back and spent about 10 minutes talking to me. She wants me to do more stuff with her and she’s been told this is why it doesn’t happen. Phone addiction is very real. But this hasn’t been legally established here.

The more you are paid, the less accountable you are.

English law 101.

You don’t know any of these things, limited facts have been reported and there is lots of speculation (and many unfounded assertions) on social media.

Posts like this one make me despair at people’s basic grasp of media literacy. Disheartening.

This is an awful tragedy and my thoughts are with the poor child and his/her family. We don’t know the facts yet.

If they weren’t watching him properly then yes they should be punished for neglect. They have a duty of care to the man they are supposedly caring for AND the public so that he doesn’t harm anybody. He severely harmed a little boy in a horrific way, so of course people are asking “wtf were the carers doing?” If they weren’t doing their jobs properly then yea I really hope they get punished for it.

You didn’t say there should be a full investigation either though, did you? You took one comment about carers being on their phone and condemned them to jail. That’s the lack of common sense; not MNers’ comprehension skills.

“If they are found to have done no wrong” is also the completely backwards way of looking at it. “Innocent until proven guilty” is what the UK legal system is based on.

I get that this incident has obviously affected you, but seriously, just stop and THINK a little before posting.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to speculate

shouldn’t everyone’s focus be on the poor boy and his family

and leave it those with the FACTS and power to deal with it

but seriously, just stop and THINK a little before posting.

This is Mumsnet ...

If it is found that they were at fault (not following procedures and risk assessments that they have agreed to with their employer) then absolutely it should be on them as individuals and not the provider company.

I think the risk assessment responsibility goes higher up than that. If there was any expectation that this individual was likely to behave aggressively you would not expect a visit to a crocodile enclosure to be authorised. Of course if it turns out the carers were not paying attention that is a factor but not the whole story.

We need the laugh emoji back. Yes, you’re right. Point taken.

If this thread informs just one person as to how appallingly carers are treated in the UK, then riddled with tripe as it is, it may have done a service.

There is a point at which people who will never ever have to experience the lives of others should really consider carefully before they wax lyrical about how those people must live their lives. Partly because it's how public discourse should work., And partly to avoid being told to go fuck themselves in the strongest possible terms. Because invariably such people have thin skins.

Carers are very poorly paid - NMW. So the quality of care is going to be poor. The pool for takers of these jobs is probably going to consist of people who have no qualifications and more often than not they are of low intelligence, who have taken a job not based on a desire to care for the disabled, but due to having very limited options. Until people who employ these carers are forced to take on people with basic education, and train them to a high standard, with a decent salary, then this will continue to happen unfortunately.

Take your post so literally?

You literally stated that the carers “clearly weren’t watching him when this happened”

You started a thread to say that they should be charged suggesting that they are to blame, even though you weren’t there and had no idea of the circumstances.

Yet you have the nerve to talk about other MNers not having common sense when you’re the one who is obviously lacking the most common sense here.

You’re just backtracking now because you know how silly you sounded.