.....re the Baby P case and others like...

[JimJammum]

I realise that, as the death penalty is no longer in effect, and assuming someone doesn't get hold of those scums and d the job we all want done....Is is unreasonable to expect that anyone male or female found guilty of child abuse should be sterilised??? At least then they wouldn't be able to have any more kids themselves to neglect, seeing as SS are unable to protect them.

While I'm ranting on the subject, I give money every month to NSPCC and have been called today by fundraisers for Save the Children....where are these charities and their support in cases such as this?? Can't SS use them and their funds/workers/whatever to assist them if necessary? Am I being too simplistic?

i agree, i also ask the question surely if SS were involved, ie child protection conferences taking place, then there would have been solicitors? what were the solicitors doing? SS have been getting all the blame but what about the health visitor? dcotors? i think everyone should be held accountable!

it is incredibly frustrating to read the stories/hear the news and be led to assume that nobody cared/did their jobs properly and the kids just fall through the net

we all want the parents/abusers to be punished. Baby P s father is claiming human rights legal protection! he should be named and his picture in the news.

It's pretty dodgy territory to suggest that forced sterilization is a good thing.

there was a similar debate recently

once you go down the route of forcible sterilisation, you are going down a questionable ethical downward spiral.

you are being too simplistic re diversion of funds,but i can understand why, these case are heart rendingly awful

let alone the little girl bullied by the barristers for 45mins. so depressing such an arcane ridiculous set up the courts are still not protecting the victims

FFS
For a start, sterilising doesn't prevent people having contact with kids, does it?
Secondly, yes, you are being really, really simplistic.

I suppose you think that donating to the NSPCC means you are 'doing your bit' and you can sit back.

Jezoo.

As ever, if you do something that is irreversible (death, sterilisation - well, hard to reverse) and then realise that you got it wrong, miscarriage of justice, its a bit awkward if you have to say 'sorry about that, err, bye'

Obviously, if anyone I know etc was subject to child abuse I would want them and their Social Worker hung, drawn and quartererd. But, complete failure of an entire social services dept aside (I live near but not in Doncaster...), as a society we have to accept that everyone in their job/life makes some mistakes.

And I'm not convinced that volunteers should be expected to take on cases like Baby P?!?! What was needed there was continuity of care, the different (Council/GP/hospital) services talking to each other, time for individuals to do the job and good management/supervision.

Yes I think you are being unreasonable but I understand where you're coming from.

hopefully the prison guards will 'see to' the father in prison, a taste of his own medicine? karma owes him some

I don't think this is a social services/ children charity issue at all. Child abuse is a societal problem and we need to look at every member of society in combating it.

Sterilisation is a ridiculous suggestion - the perpatrator in the baby p case was not a parent.........how would this have helped?

I don't want to see murderers, child abusers, rapists etc killed/attacked/sterilised or put on the front of a newspaper. I want them to be imprisoned and forgotten about.

We should be thinking about the victim not obsessing over the fate of the criminal. I hate the criminal as celebrity thing. Who buys these newspapers that tell you what OU course Myra Hindley was doing or whatever? I think the public's interest in these people is very disturbing.

I think better communication between agencies is the most important thing. The left hand very rarely knows what the right hand is doing, as in the recent case with the mum leaving a DV refuge to live with some nutter and social services not being informed. How many more times do we have to hear apologies about failures that won't happen again blah blah blah. It's unforgivable, I know SS are overworked but when doctors can't spot serious injuries something is very wrong.

i think that health visitors or some sort of professional should take more of an interest in families, ie more home visits, etc and where there is young parents, single parents they need advice about how to look after themselves and their child/children. I also think health visitors should be medically trained! my health visitor has been a serious let down to me when my ds was born, i hardly ever saw her and she made me feel like it was my fault that my ds was losing weight for the first three months of his life! both she and medical experts failed to diagnose he had a cleft soft palate! thats why i think they should have some medical training!

I don't believe that giving money enables me to sit back, nicky, all I'm saying is that I'm hearing that SS are stretched financially and with other resources - could this not be reallocated by all bodies whose jobs it is to look after children in trouble? I am frustrated that these cases and others are allowed to happen, and I want it fixed (I know it isn't that easy, BTW!). Volunteers may not be able to deal with the difficult cases on the ground, but there may be other ways in which they can help the efficiant communication links between GPs/HVs/SS etc etc which could free up time for the SS to pay more attention to what was clearly going on in front of their noses....all 57 times they visited (or whatever it was).

And yes, I am aware that forced sterilation is a difficult issue, due to miscarriages of justice.....but are we thinking then it will transpire that this guy didn't do this horrific act after all? Unlikely. Some cases, surely, are that black and white that we can be sure. And can we guarantee that this mother will adequately care for any future children she may have, including protecting them against any other lovers/partners/dealers etc that she has in her life? I think not. I just want to know that they will never be able to do anything like this to any other children, and as I cannot rely on the justice system to do that, then maybe this has to be an alternative? I know this is not going to stop contact with other children - but maybe a start??????

And yes, am horrified at 4 yr old being quizzed by barristers for 45 mins....and also that he may get of as they will appeal on grounds of witness being unreliable. Too many issues here for me to even contemplte processing, let alone ranting on here about....and I'm sure most on here would agree.

I think a major problem is short term contracts, over use of agency staff and failure to retain experienced professionals.

You can get a family that has ss all over them when they have child A, full assessments, reviews etc - a year later child B comes along and the entire staff has changed. Child B gets missed and horrible things happen.

No one becomes a social worker with the intention of doing a crap job. The worst social workers I have met have been ineffectial rather than cruel or lazy.

As a high number of abusers are step parents I dont see how sterilization would help.

Ed Balls has just announced £58m for social worker training and recruitment.

in my opinion, nothing is ever that black or white (but admit as above that if mine are subject to this sort of abuse I reserve the right to change my mind...)

Nobody has thr right to enforce death, sterilisation or any such thing on another person, whetever their crimes. We have a basic commitment in this country to the right of bodily autonomy - the right that allows women to terminate unwanted pregnancy, to say no to sex, to decide their own medical treatment, to not be assaulted (legally) etc. If you decide that a person can lose that right, for any reason, you are setting precedent for, well, pretty much any violation of that right to become acceptable.
I'd rather live in a society where murderes and rapists and child abusers 'get away with it' as such, than a society that thinks it has the right to encroach on another person's right to bodily autonomy for any reason.

Oh and re SS role and responsibility - if the govt wasn't continually pushing budget cuts and devaluing the preventative role, to the point where social workers are carrying far too many cases, and never having time for supervision with managers, or carrying out enough/sufficiently thorough home visits, the vast majority of social workers would have spotted the abuse that baby P, Victoria Climbie and all the other tragic children suffered. The problem is simply too many children and not enough time to work effectively.

jimjam, you are being too simplistic in your op.
social services do a great deal to help children and families. and a great many children and adults are around today because of social workers and all the other people who work in the arena.

forcible sterilisation isnt a route that you can or should take morally... have you ever read the short story chrysalids?

also, the only people who have the power to remove a child, is a policeman... social workers cannot do so.

perhaps as a society we need to value and reward those who work in the front line of child protection in this country... social workers are undervalued / underpaid and have low status in most people's eyes.... it is a thankless and stressful job to work in an underresourced urban local authority.

i think people shouls also face up to the fact that there will always be children who are harmed / killed by those meant to care for them. it will happen and all the social workers in the world won't change that, just as currently 4 women a week die as a result of violence from their partners / ex partners (compared to around a child a week in the uk).

agree totally that as a society we should all take responsibility for chidren's welfare.

compulsory sterilisation?? i really don't think so.

We can whip up a lynch mob and start a "sterilise them all" petition, oh yeah.

Or, we could agree that guilty convictions and custodial sentences are what the law provides for and wait for the enquiry. Once that has been published, then there's lots of scope to put pressure on for any and all recommendations to be implemented, unlike those post-Victoria Climbie.

The legal system isn't supposed to be about revenge (viz. sterilisation) and that certainly doesn't count as deterrent (viz. US states and other countries with the death penalty where people still commit murder). So what's the logic of going for state-sanctioned forced medical intervention?

Spend your time lobbying MPs to push for better funding for social services through the tax system: accept that we probably need to be paying more tax in the current dire economic climate as you can't do this on the cheap; blaming the likes of the NSPCC and Save the Children is specious. And drawing universal conclusions from specific cases, however tragic and grisly, is rarely a good move. It certainly doesn't make all those in all areas of child protection feel any better supported or valued, so makes more people leave those professions and discourages potential new recruits.

So, apologies for the length of this, can we focus on how to improve systems in the places where they're not working instead of on retribution?

I don't know about sterilisation but I do know the NSPCC receive millions of pounds in donations year on year but don't actually seem to ever do anything to help.

oh Christ has Mumsnet dumbed down.

There are more and more of these utterly moronic threads. It sounds like the Sun's website.

Pathetic.

Sorry don't mean every post is moronic. Just that the premise of the thread is.