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Child protection issue...help needed

30 replies

Mammybadgirl · 28/03/2008 17:45

I don't usually post but have a problem and need some advice.

My friend and her partner have an 8 week old baby. They discovered last week his arm had gone floppy, took him to hospital, and found out it was broken.

They are now being investigated under child protection laws (social workers, police etc). They are not allowed to bring him home from hospital and are allowed daytime contact only (she is breastfeeding). They have been told they are going to be arrested on Monday.

Does anyone have any experience or advice about this?

Also any ideas about what I can do to help them?

Cheers

OP posts:
edam · 28/03/2008 17:48

Have they got a lawyer who has experience in these cases (helping parents, not acting for SS)? That has to be the most important step.

Feel very sorry for them assuming they haven't hurt the baby. Horrifying how these accusations end up on a rollercoaster.

Janni · 28/03/2008 17:49

Are you sure they're going to be 'arrested'? I would imagine they're going to be questioned by the police.

What do you think happened to the baby?

edam · 28/03/2008 17:49

Sally Clark's solicitor is called Sue Staple - no idea where she practises but worth googling.

edam · 28/03/2008 17:52

There's an MP called John Hemmings who has spoken out in favour of wrongly-accused parents - his blog is here Might be worth getting in touch although obviously not easy over a weekend.

edam · 28/03/2008 17:53

He posts on MN, btw, as 'johnhemming', may be worth sending him a CAT if he accepts them.

PrincessPeaHead · 28/03/2008 17:55

Not entirely sure why everyone assumes the parents are wrongly-accused... an 8 week old with a broken arm? So how did that happen then?

tiredemma · 28/03/2008 17:57

What kind of delievry was it?

(Friends baby had a broken arm through dleivery, it wasnt picked up for about two weeks)

edam · 28/03/2008 17:57

I have no idea whether these parents are guilty or innocent but they deserve decent representation and the chance to defend themselves. There has been a whole series of miscarriages of justice with common features and nothing has been done to reform the system so it is entirely possible that innocent parents can be swept up.

emma1977 · 28/03/2008 18:02

Beware jumping to either conclusion as to whether or not they have harmed their baby deliberately. Remain a supportive friend, but don't take sides or pass judgement. It is up to them to arrange appropriate legal representation.

Sadly, the most likely reason for this sort of injury in a child of this age, is that it has been caused deliberately by an adult. However, there are medical reasons why a child may have broken bones and I'm sure part of the medical team's work will be to exclude an underlying medical condition. It is also standard practice for the parents to be only allowed supervised access while the police investigate and question them.

I really hope that there's an innocuous explanation for the injury. Poor child.

wannaBe · 28/03/2008 18:06

I think it?s just a bit premature to start accusing social services of wrongly accusing parents tbh. This iisn?t a case of an assumption of harm based on possibilities, this is an 8 week old baby with a broken arm. However fradgile we think babies are, they?re not that fradgile. .

If these parents didn?t harm their baby, then I would suggest they seak some medical opinion, ie does the baby have a bone disorder which have caused her bones to be brittle, was it a difficult delivery which might have caused the break, (although presumably this would have been picked up earlier).

I wouldn?t go running to any MP?s just yet because reality is you don?t know what happened, and it is entirely possible, likely even, that the parents caused harm to their baby, be that deliberately or in the heat of the moment. How was she generally? Difficult sleeper? Colicky? Cried a lot? How have the parents been coping?

Social services have to be involved. A baby with a broken arm is serious.

needtoasksomething · 28/03/2008 18:07

My DS suffered a broken arm during delivery which I spotted later as it wasnt picked up by the midwives.
How recent is the break? Can they tell from the x rays?
I was very lucky in that I had the advice of a friend in the medical profession at the time to ensure that all DSs records noted that this injury happened during birth as otherwise it could have come back on me if noticed later and no records to back up what actually happened.
My heart goes out to all of them if something similar has happened here

edam · 28/03/2008 18:09

I didn't accuse SS of anything, fgs. Merely answered the OP who was asking what she could do for help. And I wasn't suggesting 'running to MPs' I was suggesting John Hemmings might be able to point them in the direction of sources of advice.

wannaBe · 28/03/2008 18:18

fair enough Edam, it's just that it's all too easy for things like this to become histerical on both sides, with people shouting "miscarriage of justice, call your mp and speak to the press" on one side, and "evil child abusers, lock them away for ever" on the other, without there being any middle ground.

fiodyl · 28/03/2008 18:19

get good legal representation imediatly- one that wil actively fight our case and let ou speak in court. do not trust social services or anything they say.do not agre to or sign anything as part of a "deal" with them as they will always find a way to back out of there part of it. press doctors for an absolute diagnosis based on fact not just theory.

I had a very nasty doctor inform social services that 1st one then both my daughters arms had been broken-she also told them that she had told me i was picking her up incorrectly 3 times but i refused to listen to her-this was not true and infact after a 2nd and 3rd opinionher arms had never been broken just she had an inherited medical condition.
Unfortunatleyby then it was to late social services were alreay involved and rocded to ruin the lives of myself , my daughter, her brother and the rest of my family

wannaBe · 28/03/2008 18:23

and while I find it hard to see how a baby's crm could be broken without parental involvement (apart from if there was a medical condition which caused this), I can see how a parent might snap in the heat of the moment and act out of character, due to lack of sleep, baby crying constantly, pnd, etc. It's entirely possible that these parents did cause harm to their baby, but might still need help, not condemnation.

Janni · 28/03/2008 19:42

I agree about the need for very thorough medical investigation into this injury and about the need for the couple to have good legal representation.

It's possible the baby's arm was broken during birth and it's possible that the baby has a condition which causes the bones to be fragile.

It's interesting that the couple took the baby to hospital themselves. It suggests to me that they did not harm the baby. Surely they would have tried to avoid hospital had they injured the baby themselves?

There is one other scenario: one of the couple injured the baby and the other either does not know or is covering up. If they cover up for each other and it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that the baby was harmed whilst in the parents' care, they will very likely have the baby taken away.

emma1977 · 28/03/2008 21:25

Janni, your comment about them seeking medical attention making them more likely to be innocent sadly may not be true.

A colleague of mine saw a 10 week old baby last week with a swollen leg at the instigation of both parents. Turns out the child had leg fractures, broken ribs and a collapsed lung. The male partner was arrested the following day and admitted everything. The female partner was aware that he had caused injuries at the time they had gine to the GP.

LynetteScavo · 28/03/2008 21:33

Maybe I'm just really innocent, but I can't imagine an adult hurting a tiny baby.

Mammybadgirl, what's your gut feeling on this?

Janni · 28/03/2008 21:58

emma - perhaps I'm trying too hard to be fair and not jump to conclusions. Our DD is adopted as a result of non-accidental injury so this one is close to home for me! At the same time, there ARE other explanations for a baby's broken arm and I would hope it would all be thoroughly investigated.

I would be curious to know what the OP thinks!

fledtoscotland · 28/03/2008 22:01

am not really sure why they are being arrested without evidence and a broken bone isnt evidence. I fell down the stairs with DS when he was 2wks old and at hospital they found a skull fracture. we were transferred to the childrens hospital for a brain scan and the consultant concluded the broken nose was from the fall (me pushing him against my collar bone) and the skull fracture was from birth. we were never under any suspicion - in fact we never had any contact with social services/police/child protection. birth can cause fractures as Tiredemma says.

oops · 28/03/2008 22:20

Message withdrawn

pedilia · 28/03/2008 23:02

emma- how horrible

Mammybadgirl · 29/03/2008 10:46

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I really really do not believe that they have purposely done anything to harm him.

I am worried about the SS response. They could have decided to allow them home with the baby under the supervision of a 'responsible other' (i.e.friend or family member) but instead they chose to separate them and keep the baby in hospital even though he's bf (will have to be bottle fed now I suppose). It seems irrational to me and not in the baby's best interests - it makes me worry even more about what they'll do/decide next.

OP posts:
cory · 29/03/2008 10:59

The one thing you can do is to stay calm and be quietly supportive without taking sides. If you do help them with kindness/anything practical and then find out they were guilty, it's not the end of the world- it's not as if you were aiding and abetting them.

On the one side, you can't really know that your friends are innocent, however well you think you know them. Parents do hurt their children, even parents that noone would suspect for a moment. And yes, sometimes they do take them to hospital afterwards. Not everybody who hurts their child meant to do it, and if you are a loving parent and discover you have hurt your child- yes, then you would try to get them to hospital.

It may also have been an accident (like falling with the baby)and they are too scared to say. I put dd's pram together the wrong way when she was a baby and it came apart in the road- she went head first onto the pavement. Thankfully, she wasn't hurt, but she could have been. I like to think that I would have had the courage to tell the truth at A&E, but I can see that a parent might panic, particularly if the fall is a result of someone being slightly careless (like leaving child unattended on changing table).

On the other side, I think it may be overly optimistic to suggest that if there was a medical condition, the hospital would have picked up on it. That all depends on the competence, experience and preconceived ideas of whoever saw the baby at the time. Children (and adults) are misdiagnosed/not diagnosed when they should be every year.

I myself had a very strange experience of dd being kept in hospital and not allowed home. The consultant paeditrician thought she must have been sexually abused because she had ankle pains despite X-rays revealing a lack of broken bones. To his mind this meant she must have gone through a trauma= sexual abuse. And this was a 7yo who was perfectly capable of explaining her own situation. Of course, it's easy to say that this couldn't have happened, that any doctor would know that the human body is not made up of bones alone, so no hospital could possibly have made such a mistake. Except they did. And I was terrified.

Children have been taken into care before now, only to be diagnosed later with brittle bone disease; it can take a long time to diagnose.

So both scenarios are perfectly possible. The parents may be guilty or the hospital may have missed something. I think there are two things you can do without committing yourself too far:

you can do the ordinary neighbourly cups-of-tea, offering practical help, offering a shoulder to cry on.

you can suggest that they get legal representation. Even if they're guilty, they still have a right to have their case put.

Janni · 29/03/2008 12:44

Thinking of you. I'm sure your instincts are right. I really hope they get this sorted quickly.