Laura Corkill - Her Son's Eulogy

[Dreamwhisper]

I'm just reading the article on the BBC about the experience of Leiland-James' birth mother.

I understand that there are two sides to every story, and that being honest and 100% factual about the complexities around a child being removed can be hard to unpick.

But the whole situation really shines a light on women who are losing everything, losing their children, due to the actions of abusive men.

I was so horrified and brought to tears (well I was crying the whole time) when I read the following:

"They even tried to write the eulogy," she says. The BBC has seen a draft copy of it sent by a social worker, which includes the words: "Leiland I am sorry I was not able to be the parent you needed."

How can this be? The article also suggests that several women have come forward to the charity involved to say that children had been removed from the care of the mother and place with the father accused of abuse?

What's going on here. The prejudice mothers who are also DV victims is appalling.

Its a good point about the charity

There has been a huge amount of naivety on behalf of various posters on threads about this, as if because some support workers at that charity support mum, therefore theirs views must hold some weight or be correct in terms of what was safe for her son at the time he was removed

The reality is that large numbers of these types of charities dont have professionally trained/qualified workers, they find it really difficult to weigh up the checks and balances in terms of safeguarding. They often dont share critical information which could be instrumental in protection. They often have a skewed understanding of the statutory duties of Local Authorities and often view the situation in terms of 'give her another chance', without considering what chance the child needs to have.

I dont know anything about the charity concerned in this case, I am merely talking generally from my experience over the years.

I was and am disturbed by how many social workers were insistent that despite the charity supporting Laura Corkhill’s version of events and despite the fact that their judgement was at best questionable anyway given where Leiland James was eventually placed, that no mistake had been made when he was removed in the first place.

I think what most people were saying is that it’s impossible to know whether he should or should not have been removed as none of us (including the charity) would have had access to the considerable evidence which would have been put before the court in the care proceedings, but that there are some things that are being said (such as she didn’t know) which would have to be factually inaccurate due to the processes involved in court proceedings.

This is one of the best posts I’ve seen about this tragedy.

It is definitely a fair point and how I would usually see things, I'm just very concerned at the concept of children being removed due to "potential future harm" if this is the case.

I don't think this can be confirmed as we aren't privvy to enough detail and despite the article featuring Laura being interesting, it still didn't really address what SS's concerns actually were, as in specifically, with Laura's lifestyle or abilities.

I do worry though, that based on articles like these, and (though of course this can't be used as evidence or quantified or anything) of threads on places like parenting sites such as MN - there have been a couple floating about recently - that vulnerable women have an in built bias against them.

As in, young women, care leavers, DV victims, for example. Of course you can't deny that objectively, statistically these women could be considered less able than the general population, but I just still have a bad feeling that they are poorly judged by SS pre-emptively

I am haunted by the poster concerned with her young friend or relative who has failed her parenting assessment going round at the moment. Not just the OPs posts but those sharing experiences (on both sides) of the parental assessment procedure made it seem like a very concerning process.

We assume (and I think in most cases to be fair, rightly) that there is a rigorous system in place to not only protect children from abuse but also to protect families from being torn apart unnecessarily. I am concerned that for people like Laura that where support could be offered and monitored, removal is seen as the default choice.

Children are only removed due to future potential harm, what other reason do you think they are removed?

I think its difficult for people not involved in the family court proceedings to comprehend the supports/interventions/resources which are put in place, repeatedly, assessment after assessment, various expert assessments, time for therapy to take place, often private health or therapy provided to ensure that every last option is considered. The courts do not allow for this NOT to happen even if SSD werent wanting to provide this

The upshot is that children are very often drifting through these processes when their permanency and certainty about those decisions could have been made months ago when its so clear that the parents cannot make sustainable change. They are exposed to parents having contact with them at a high rate, sometimes several times a week when these are the very parents who have traumatised or abused/neglected them, this continues throughout the proceedings which drag and drift due to all of the above interventions and support that needs to be input

I'm just very concerned at the concept of children being removed due to "potential future harm" if this is the case.

The alternative is to wait until they are abused.

All this! The amount of people you on here who cannot comprehend what SS have to do to remove a child is quite frankly shocking.

@Eastangular2000

The threshold is scarily high isn't it?

And her we have people saying that it should be even higher.

The reality is these are children who have been abused, they have been neglected, been exposed to DV, parents with MH/addiction issues, left unsupervised, beaten, starved, health and education not attended to

The work thats done with parents is to look at whether they can change their parenting to ensure that the children's needs are met, can they keep their child safe, can they protect them, get them to school, feed them, clean them, get support for their substance abuse etc etc

If a parent cant change,, then the assessment is that the children continue to be at risk, they are at risk of future harm. And often the parenting that the children now need because of the previous harm to them, is that they need better than 'good enough', they need carers who can now manage quite difficult behaviour, to overcome and heal the previous trauma. The parents need to show that they've made changes but they can sustain those changes until the child is an adult AND that they can parent in a way that supports the trauma that the child has previously experienced.

If they cant do that, then the child will be further harmed in future.

Very true @bellac11

I guess a more accurate statement would be the heartbreaking "the alternative would be to wait until they have been abused enough" which is just so awful.

Obviously I don't mean 'enough' personally, any abuse is 'enough'. I just mean threshold wise.

I feel so lucky that I got a second chance at life and was adopted.

^^ exactly this. Do you really think parents should get a chance to expose each and every one of their children to harm in turn? To get a fresh chance to neglect each new baby? What's shocking is how much harm children coming into the adoption system have ready suffered - then their adoptive parents/foster carers get to spend many years trying to help them heal.

Exactly, there is a threshold in law and as someone says, its high enough in order to obtain an order, its even higher to obtain separation certainly for babies.

I wish people could grasp that most children are removed when the harm has actually been done.

My son had 4 years of gross neglect before he was finally removed. If social services have been working with someone for four years after birth of child 1, do you really think they are going suddenly going to parent child 2 any more successfully?

Child protection is always concerned with whether a children either HAS been significantly harmed or IS AT RISK of significant harm. Future risk of harm is always a basis for children’s social care to be involved.

I don’t know the ins and outs of this case or why the child was removed from his mother’s care, but just wanted to point that out to the OP.

I also agree with this.

I’ve recently known of an adoption of a baby where a similar small womens charity was supporting a woman to oppose the adoption.

This woman has had four children removed previously, all at separate times, for neglect. She is a crack cocaine addict who hasn’t lasted more than a few months out of rehab over the course of 12 years. The father of the child is also someone with a long history of crack addiction, prison and paranoid schizophrenia.

The women’s charity might be well meaning, but they do not have full access to the birth parents history and do not understand the full context. This baby deserves protection from the misery his older siblings suffered.

I can't speak to all cases, everywhere, OP. I can tell you what I've seen.

That has been a system that bends over backward (though not always effectively) to support families to stay together. Intervention after intervention.

I've seen a man father seven DC on three/four different women. He was assessed for his capacity to parent with each birth, and the children were removed every time. The adoption of each sibling was delayed as the next was assessed, so they could go together. I was involved with three babies in three years. The incapacity of the mum was evident. We're talking about no hygiene. No self care. No ability to meet the basic needs of the baby, let alone as the baby grew and its needs became more complicated. They did assessments with him, with her mum, and on her own.

She was sweet but hopeless. She thought the sun shone out of his rear and couldn't be shaken in that belief. She would forget to look at her dc because she was so busy looking at him.

The services cleaned up her house, got her new carpet (badly cared for dog), got the scurvy and headlice and bed bugs treated, got new beds....

The dog shouldn't have been left with them, let alone a baby.

The babies never went to the house. They went to foster care from the hospital. Then adoption.

@exwhyzed makes some very valid points. As a social worker I have worked with some very concerning support workers in refuges. As a service we have had to escalate issues within the charity running them. Two particularly female support workers spring to mind.
They often aligned themselves as friends of the ladies they were supporting, often demonstrating very concerning professional boundaries.
In one refuge 2 workers covered up and failed to report incidents of neglect, and made access to the refuge very difficult to see the children, then had the cheek to raise that they had been very concerned about mothers parenting all along, it was too late by then, one of the children had a physical injury.
I understand that supporting victims is about getting alongside them, gaining trust and building a relationship, clearly very important but in my experience that often impacts on their ability to prioritise safeguarding.

That said, I have worked with some amazing IVDAs and support workers from charities but it makes me think about opportunities for training and learning for the support workers beyond very basic intro to safeguarding type stuff so services could work alongside each other more effectively. Hopefully the 2 refuges local to where I work are not the norm but this one sided article from BBC and their account makes me curious....

Totally agree,though I'd also say the BBC bears some responsibility. This might be a good story for them but it clearly isn't in her interests.

Well this is what I meant really.

And this testament directly conflicts with this statement: Children are only removed due to future potential harm, what other reason do you think they are removed?

Or at least it conflicts with what I mean by what I said.

Please let me be clear I am not advocating for the threshold for children to be removed to be higher than it already is. Nor am I criticising SS.

I was just interested by the article as my interest in intersectional feminism is high. I was wondering what people's thoughts were about their potentially being systemic unconscious bias or even sometimes active discrimination against more vulnerable women in society. To be fair, Laura's case may not really be the best example of this. It was more the entitlement and the audacity of the fact that these people who are supposed to be in roles of support and safeguarding held the attitudes that allowed them to write what they wrote in Laura's son's eulogy.

This thread certainly supposed to be a discussion about whether the threshold of removal should be higher, or lower. Just that women who will always find themselves slipping through the cracks of our society may face the same sorts of prejudices when it comes to motherhood.

certainly was not supposed to be a (more generic) discussion about SS removal thresholds

*I think Laura has been let down quite a bit on this by the charity supposed to be supporting her actually.

Those of us who know anything about these systems know that an awful lot of what she is saying can't possibly be true*

I did suspect this sadly. While I haven't experienced this it doesn't sound remotely plausible that there were no notices, or pre meetings, or anything before deciding to physically remove a newborn baby.

The only way this could happen surely is a complete and wilful lack of engagement? Fully accept I could be totally wrong about this, but I can't imagine there is any event in life that would have more red tape and bureaucracy involved than the removal of an infant.

I think you're misunderstanding this. Hopefully not willfully

Children are harmed all the time, usually unintentionally. Parents make mistakes, or need to learn new skills or sometimes just lose it with their kids.

Sometimes they are in a really bad place and mistreat or neglect their children.

The child has therefore suffered harm

Do you think that children are removed if the parent is then assessed as posing no future risk to the child? Far more children are supported to remain with their parents after harm has been caused to a child, their parent learns, stops using substances, gets help for their MH, leaves the violent partner, stops gambling, learns good parenting skills, all manner of changes can take place.

The parent is then assessed as able to meet their child needs and the child is not considered to be at risk of future harm.

But if, as in the example you are using the child has suffered harm and the parent is assessed as unable to change their parenting to ensure that the child does not suffer future harm, then the only recommendation that can be made to the courts is that the child cannot be returned to the parent. The risk of future harm is too high.

Unless you think children are removed from their parents as punishment to the parent? Why would children be removed from parents who could parent them safely in the future?

This is really interesting thank you - I can imagine there are some charity workers who are switched on and can act appropriately and then some like you said who may have been through similar and have that "SS are evil" attitude already.

It must be so frustrating to watch because instead of getting actual support with making changes they're just getting validation.

It is reasonable to point out that the charity may not have been privy to all the details.

However, I remain concerned by the absolute refusal to even consider that a mistake or an error of judgement or bias could have been made, even when it clearly was given how the adoption ended.

Excuse me? Why do you need to be rude, why would I be wilfully misunderstanding something?

I'm genuinely interested in whether this (bias against mothers who are DV victims or otherwise vulnerable) is a genuine issue or not. I'm not talking about cases where children should clearly be removed. I'm not saying vulnerable women should be given a free pass and have endless support thrown at them at the detriment of their child. I don't know what Laura's life was like before during or after her child's removal. I'm not making any case for or against her. But I can't discredit everything the article says either, which is why I thought it would be an interesting discussion from a feminist perspective.

It's not about whether I think children should have to be harmed before parents are finally stripped of their responsibility. It's simply my understanding that the threshold for removing children is quite high, which does mean there is sadly evidence of harm. As is the experience someone who has adopted a child has posted.