Elsie Scully-Hicks

[Elephantgrey]

How can you understand how someone can harm such a tiny baby. My husband knew Matthew Scully-Hicks and said you would never imagine he would be the sort of person to do something like this. When we first heard about it we imagined that he had just snapped but seeing the news report he inflicted so many injuries on her since the day she arrived. It's just heartbreaking.

bubblebubblepop and tiktoc, Sorry but they are the reasons my friend was refused. She is not a liar.

I agree with elephant, people think ss are wonderful and they really are not. They have foster families that abuse children and there is proof that they are doing so and yet refuse to believe it or take action. The split siblings up and put them in homes miles and miles away from each other.

Foster parents get quite a lot of money for the children they are supposed to look after but if they decide to use it for holidays (and they don't take the children with them) or towards a flashy car that's ok. The children can be dressed in charity shop clothes that are actually too small and look awful.

It's not hearsay or just bitterness from my friend. I have seen it with my own eyes. It's disgusting. Children are suffering because SS can't or won't do their job properly

notreally its not hard to get emotionally caught up in a case like this for lots of reasons.

TheFirstMrsDV it was the photos of her wee smiling face that got to me, she was so tiny and deserved such love, security and happiness. It makes me realise how vulnerable wee ones in the care system really are and just how bloody lucky my brother and I were.

mydog I believe you.
I am not a SS basher and have spent hours arguing on MN on this point but as a kinship adopter myself I am very aware of obstacle put in the way of relatives who want to have custody of children.

Some SW are very against kinship care. They think other family members are the same as the birth parents.
They think children need a clean break from all family
They think its unfair for family to keep an easy to place child when 'good' families are out there wanting to give a child a home
They assume extended families will hand the child back.

BUT there are relatives who refuse to acknowledge there are issues with birth parents and continue to defend them
There are relatives who are not able to keep the kids safe from the birth parents even with the best will in the world.

Its never simple.

Oh that's interesting. We have an SGO too. Maybe it gives you a certain perspective.

Perhaps a "parent" screaming and swearing at a 10 year old would not prompt a phone call...
But a baby?

I don't know why they changed the name - none of us on here do.

I do know that Shayla was a very very unusual name in the year that she was born (outside top 100 in England and Wales; number 800 in the US), so it is entirely possible that SS suggested a name change to something more usual.

It is also possible that they didn't want a perceived "chavvy" name, but that in itself doesn't deny that her birth name was potentially a risk to the adoption.

FWIW we didn't change our adopted DD's name, but we did think about what we would do with a Chardonnay type name. One thing that vexed us was that keeping it would have been tantamount to putting her in a t shirt that announced to the world "I'm adopted". DH, DS and I all have rather boring, traditional middle class names, and a child called Chardonnay would have stuck out a mile. Being able to let DD choose who to tell about her being adopted has been a more precious gift than we could ever have known back then, and it pains me that SW often don't consider this aspect of the debate.

McTufty - my understnading from the reporting is that the birth grandmother had weekly contact with Shayla until placement. I think that the media reference to "adoption" wasn't meaning the adoption order

I cannot fathom how it can possibly be right that she wasn't told about Shayla / Elsie's death until seven months afterwards. It has reminded me that DH and I keep meaning to write instructions on what should happen in the event that DH, DD and I all die together, so that DD's birth family can be informed without our families having to grapple with SS. We must get on and do that

olenna he wasn’t arrested until about 6 or 7 months later. I wonder if that’s why - until it was considered murder it wasn’t SS’s business, IYSWIM. As they were post AO, SS might not even have been aware.

I know we agreed to making birth family aware if anything were to happen to LO before he reached adulthood

FatMe - yes, that makes sense now. So the grandmother was made aware once SS were made aware.

(I still think it's very sad that neither of the adoptive parents or the police thought it important to let SS or the birth family know)

I just wanted to highlight how common adoptive breakdowns are, proper records of this aren't kept but it is thought to be possibly as high as a third. Hopefully the signs are there before it is finalized but everyone, adoptive parents and professionals are very invested in a positive outcome. professional optimism can be an issue as can parents understandable reluctance to say that something they have fought very hard for isn't working.

I had no idea until recently that adoptions could break down. XH asked my dad once if he wished he’d kept my receipt and taken me back to the shop! I thought Dad was going to knock him out.

professional optimism can be an issue
I felt incredibly pressured to tell SW I loved LO in early days if placement, long before I did.

Most recent figures say 3-9% of adoptions break down or disrupt. But a recent radio 4 feature said 25% of adoptions are in crisis.

As I mentioned upthread, when I adopted 12 yeas ago, name changing was a no no. There was a massive emphasis on accepting the child as they are and valuing the name the birth parents had given them.

One very interesting thing that happened on our adoption preparation workshop was that we were all asked to write down on a piece of paper how many children we had hoped to have when we decided to start a family and to write down what we would have named these children if they had come along.

I wrote down the names I had hoped to be able to name my children.

At the end of that session we were told that we would not be matched to a child with any of the names we had written down.

They explained that we had to grieve for the children we were not able to have and it wouldn't be a good idea to adopt a child with the same name.

That sounds incredibly harsh Angels
Very unfair on parents who are adopting due to fertility issues.
Bloody sneaky too.

As I said earlier, the birth grandmother already has custody of Shayla's older siblings. Social services must therefore think that she is a fit and proper person to be caring for children. Why would they not let Shayla live with her siblings and her grandmother ?

Once a child is adopted I doubt the birth family have anymore right (legally) to know a child has died than anyone else does.
Adoption severs all rights.
I think it morally wrong not to tell them though.

Angels - wowsers, that's harsh

MrsDV - I think you must be right about the legal situation following the AO. But also right about the moral situation (that's the view that DH and I have - but then we have a pretty good letterbox relationship with DD's birth family, which probably colours our views)

I was adopting after fertility problems and I remember being quite upset at the end of that session. I kept imagining this perfect child that we would be prevented from adopting just because of his or her name!

I now see that there was some sense to it as it did allow me to move on.

We ended up adopting the most perfect and beautiful baby boy who has a name that is often looked on unfavourably in the baby names section. I admit to feeling a little bit embarrassed calling his name in the early days as it didn't really fit in with all the very middle class names of our friend's kids. Now I'm proud to call out his name as it is his name and he is awesome!

Would be particularly harsh if somebody had said they'd been hoping for a family of twelve and written down all the possible girls' and boys' names.

(Hope nobody thinks that's an unacceptable degree of levity on a thread about such a tragic issue. Apologies if so.)

The World At One on Radio 4 has been running a series on adoption featuring interviews with the birth parents as well as social workers. I've only heard a couple of the interviews but it's been very thought-provoking. Last week the birth mother disputed all the things SS thought she'd fallen down on. This week the birth father confirmed that SS had it right as regards his (now) ex-wife, but he disputed all the SS allegations about his own behaviour. The children are too young to be able to confirm or refute any of this stuff. Dreadfully sad.

It may be that the reason the birth family werent told she had died for so long was that the dad was already a suspect and was being investigated and therefore soc services had to keep quiet whilst that was going on to prevent jeopardising the case. The birth family might have gone to the press etc before the police were ready with enough evidence to make their move.

Angels if there was an official top ten of MN's most hated names my DC's would definitely be in the top five.

Its not that I don't have any sympathy with people who adopt children with names they really don't like. I do get it.
I just feel very strongly about names being a vital part of our kid's identity.

Here's to our awesome children

Olenna I can't imagine keeping that information back from a family can you?

Gasp its worth catching up with the podcasts. Birth mum's family agree that she was unable to parent. Birth mum and dad in pretty much total denial.
Grandparents are unable to take the two little ones on because they already have siblings. There is also an infant, younger than Ben and Bethany.