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.

The problem is unikely to be the carers.

It's more likely to be the fact that an uncontrollable man who was likely to do something like this was out and about in the first place.

Most carers are women and even two strong women would be unable to stop an adult man who acts quickly and suddenly even if they could actually overpower him.

We don't know the ages, sex, height or build, let alone how much experience these carers had, neither do we know the height and build of the man, so if the carers were 2 women how would they be expected to stop a fully grown man from attacking anybody. Unless they were armed with a tazer or experts in martial arts I'm not sure what they could have done to physically stop him. As to 1 being on their phone at the time nobody (as yet), knows whether they were on Tik-Tok or expressing concerns to someone senior that maybe the man was getting agitated and how best to proceed. To say "it's all the carers fault, lock them up" is too simplistic at this stage.

Don't be daft

Teaching industry
Care industry
Retail industry
Bank industry

etc etc

That is just what is is

That you decided to take my post and choose THAT as the thing you were unhappy about, shows more about you than you realise

I don't know what has gone wrong in the care system, but something clearly has.

I see carers accompanying very old and disabled people in my town around the supermarkets and they look disinterested, on their phones, and incapable. I've heard them struggle to communicate with the people they are looking after. Are they agency staff? If so, someone is making a pretty penny charging for them, and paying peanuts.

This. This is the third thread in the last day or so about this. None of us know the detail so maybe we should wait until the outcome of the investigation before rushing to judgement. More and more, carers are having to use phone apps to refer to care plans and document care given. If this is the case then it’s not the individual carers to blame, it’s the system they work within.

YANBU.

Common sense isn’t lacking, your post was very clear. You are totally backtracking after being told YABU.

Because witnesses are coming forward and its being reported online???

And next it will be parents fault......

No.
This goes above minimum wage care workers who are told what to do and who to take where.

In which case whoever has completed the risk assessment and allocated the level of care required in public, should be required to give an account of themselves.

Witnesses are coming forward and reporting that the carers were on their phones. The assumption is that they were bored and scrolling, when the reality is that care plans and documentation are all online these days.

There is also the issue here of do we go back to locking people up in asylums? There are lots of posts on MN about people with children with high levels of need....imagine if this was your child who did something like this. Would you then be so outraged at the incident? Or would you be pushing for your child to have carers who enable them to go out to places so they aren't simply locked away? Yes the investigation is needed to work out what happened on the day but I don't think it is a simple case.

The problem here, it's a low paid and demanding job with an existing skills shortage. Did these carers fail in their duty? Yes. But, making this role even less desirable by adding to the liability will potentially cause a huge crisis within a vital sector.

Additionally there is a high turnover of staff in the care industry. I witnessed appalling standards of care when my elderly mum was in receipt of LA funded carers at home. The majority were youngsters pretty much straight out of school or working to fund Uni. They were using it as a stepping stone to something else and the apathy and lack of empathy towards those in their care was palpable.

Yes and no ..
It's a badly paid profession
Start holding people to being responsible for what their charges do ,and even less people will want to do the job

It’s not hard to recruit in general , but it’s hard to recruit skilled people who are suitable for the job . I work in this area - education - throughout my company there are a lot of agency staff and they are not always the right people for the job . It is a job that requires no qualifications, there is not a lot of training - and when there is a lot of it is very simple and “ tick box” training . I have a lot of worries for the young people I work with who are in supported living and residential settings and I am filing safeguarding reports on a daily basis in regards to the care they are receiving in these settings.

The pay needs to be higher to attract people, with qualification requirements because it’s a very important and difficult job. Higher up in this industry there is accountability for things going wrong that can actually lead to charges so if there is a failing then it likely will.

We don’t know what happened. It could be that care staff were on their phones, I have seen that. It could be that correct risk assessments weren’t done and the individual should never have been in a place with young children and most certainly not able to move away from his carers to do what he did - but we just don’t know . I do also know that individuals can not ever exhibit any kind of aggressive behaviour at all and then one day just do it .

It’s a horrible situation .

There is another thread discussing this and the amount of calls for people with learning disabilities and MH issues to be locked away in the public interest is really concerning. Not least because it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding as to what is happening within the services supposed to support these conditions.

As an outreach worker, I encountered many situations were parents (some elderly and dealing with adult children much bigger and stronger than themselves) were left with little to no support while caring for adult children with these conditions. Many actually had to set up safe rooms in their homes to escape the violence meted out when those they cared for had meltdowns. This incident happened in public, but similar is happening behind closed doors because there simply aren’t the resources to deal with it. I’d wager that we’ll eventually find that this man has been allocated an inappropriate care setting because there was simply nowhere else for him to be placed.

Surely there is a middle ground between locking people up in asylums and taking people with LD to crocodile enclosures with small children running around.

How about the botanical gardens, or a nice park? Somewhere without an open balcony 10 floors up, or deadly animals around. How about, people who work with people who have LD do their jobs properly?

If people were sent to prison for a moment's inattention at work, we'd all be inmates.

If they prove to have been on their phones, then they'll probably get fired and deserve it, but prison - no.

Actually
I do have a dc who at one point in his life I could of seen him doing something..that would of brought him in to contact with police .
If that meant locking him up to stop him injuring someone else
I'd of been negligent as his mum to not agree

The perpetrator should be locked up whilst awaiting trial.

The internet reported carers were on their phone and you think that’s enough to decide they should go to prison. Ridiculous.

The severely mentally disabled man?

Isn't safeguarding a 2-way street? Surely we should be protecting the public AND protecting the man with the LD so he is not put in a position where he can harm someone and cause him distress as well.

When I do risk assessments in my job, I have to think about the hazards that may happen when I am doing it, and then make a plan to mitigate them. So, who on earth missed the bit about the crocodile enclosure and what could happen?

If someone is big, powerful and unpredictable even if the carers had been paying attention they probably couldnt have stopped him. Reminds me of the person on mumsnet in a queue with her daughter and a mentally disabled adult man grabbed her daughter's long hair and couldnt be prised off. There's a man near us whose elderly parents bring him swimming weekly who absolutely couldnt be physically stopped by them. Perhaps we need to seriously rethink the way we risk assess inclusion.