Leiland James Corkhill - heartbreaking interview with his birth mum. Obviously upsetting content relating to physical abuse of a baby.

[LastThursdayInJuly]

I can’t post the link but if you Google Leiland James and BBC news the interview will come up.

Of course, some children can’t stay safely with their parents but this case really doesn’t seem one of them. I’m not commenting on what happened to Leiland James afterwards because it’s obviously practically unheard of for adoptive parents to murder their children.

But I am concerned that people like Laura Corkhill are not treated fairly by SS and are not really able to navigate the system properly. I also agree with the woman who observed that it further punished women suffering domestic abuse by taking their children from them.

I think that while the family was wrong to conceal their finances, health and alcohol consumption, a situation where they could hide it should never have arisen.

@ChuckBerrysBoots I think you are minimising and covering up for social workers involved in this case.. There needs to be accountability from all agencies and a huge emphasis on the well being of the child, first and foremost,
Robust and Timely Response to concerns
I really hope all social workers learn from this.

"Years earlier, she suffered domestic violence, but weeks after asking for help to remove her abusive partner from the home, her children were taken instead"

Quote from the mum in the BBC.

From this read that she didn't leave the abusive relationship of her own volition. She chose to stay and to expose her DC's to DV. Yes, I know and empathise with how hard it is to leave. But once you've told services about DV you have to choose to leave or they will take your DC's.

It will be this lack of insight and her lack of taking action to leave herself which will have raised the risk threshold to remove a subsequent DC. Given that his DF isn't mentioned we can only assume he was violent/ in prison etc.

I really hope all social workers learn from this.

And GPs, therapeutic services and wider families of adopters too?

I’m glad to see so many people here who know exactly what social workers need to do and presumably will be signing up to qualify and do the job imminently.

It seems that the woman who killed him admitted to a NHS therapy service that she drank a bottle of wine a day and had anger management issues.

Social services missed this.

I highly doubt they’d miss this if it was the birth mother who was accessing this service.

So why is there such disparity in how they treat different people?

Or the NHS failed to share the information.

I’m not a pilot, surgeon, bus driver, farmer or politician either @TheCrowening . I can still say the plane crashed.

And as on the very first page, no one is criticising individuals. But something is rotten in the state of Cumbria, isn’t it?

While I do feel sad and sorry for Laura Corkhill, I think the emphasis needs to be on why this baby was placed (and allowed to remain) with foster/adoptive parents who were so clearly utterly unsuitable.

I've read (and all of us are going off what we've read) that the foster "mother" told the SW that she did not love and had not bonded with Leiland James but because the extended family did love him, "he was going nowhere". If true, immediate alarms should have gone off.

There appears to be a number of social workers on here who just will not accept that social workers had any liability for this little baby's death. There were other agencies involved and they too should be held accountable but for social workers to defend the indefensible seems utterly wrong to me.
I would like to see all social services have the words Robust and Timely Response to Concerns on their office wall. Teachers were encouraged to have the slogan, Every Child Matters, on staff room walls. Social workers should be similarly focused on doing their best and responding promptly.

The NHS service chose not to pass the information on, how can social services miss something that the NHS trust chose not to share.

@Simonjt
I can't believe you are trying to minimise the mistakes made by social workers. What hope is there for Social Services if all you do is blame other agencies?
You are not in any way taking responsibility for significant failures.
That is wrong.

From the BBC
*
A safeguarding children board review found there were systemic failings in the adoption process*

And

The NSPCC said the murder was a "pivotal reminder" of the need for national leadership and radical reform of children's social care.

Thats not what anyone SW or not is saying. I think everyone accepts that the adoption was a complete tragedy that should never have happened, and multiple agencies are responsible including SW.
However that does not mean that the baby should have been left with the mother. Also no one has said its easy to escape dv no one has said there shouldn't be more support, but SW first duty of care is to the children not the mother they do whats best for the children.

It doesn't say none of it was the fault of social workers working on the case.

You haven’t answered the question though. If the therapy service knew a parent was drinking 6 bottles of wine a week and worried about her short temper with her birth child yet didn’t report it - why is that the social worker’s fault? I’m not a social worker, but when the focus is always on the actions of the council, other agencies don’t change the way they should, even when the failure is clearly multi-agency as it is in the case and in almost every other SCR.

@Wellthatsachangeforthebetter

But the whole point of this case is that they did not do what was best for the child. They acted on a potential threat to the unborn baby's welfare and ignored the actual abuse that the adoptive mother admitted to before the baby's murder

The adoptive mother did admit to hitting the baby and fostering the baby out. Social services knew about this and chose to ignore the information. Hence the recommendation for a
'Robust and Timely Response to Concerns

@Parkperson00 and I would say the two things are separate, yes the adoption placement was a complete tragedy and awful totally accepted by everyone, but that does not mean that he should have been left with the mother. The SW's didnt know what was going to happen, so at the time of removal that was deemed the best thing.
What should have happened is he should have been placed in a safe and loving home.

@Simonjt is not responsible for the obvious failures that lead to this tragedy. He has given his (valid) perspective as an adoptive parent.

I know that the failure to share information between agencies properly can be a major factor when these terrible things happen. I am certainly not absolving Cumbria SSD of any responsibility, but it needs to be considered here.

Would you like me to pretend that other agencies aren’t also responsible? Or are you happy for other agencies to not pass on information?

Why would I be taking any responsibility for any failures?

I read these threads and shake my head at the confident and definitive assertions that mistakes are never made. So naive and trusting in a repeatedly proved to be untrustworthy and unfit for purpose system.

I wonder if people do this because they like to ‘other’ themselves.

They aren’t like Laura Corkhill or the ‘others’ - they don’t have an abusive partner, or someone in the family who’d hurt their children so it will never happen to them. They took in the comfort they think they’re afforded. But trust me, it can happen to anyone - especially any woman. You could find yourself tomorrow in a situation where someone thinks somebody else’s actions mean YOU may not be a fit parent.

And Cumbria Social Services failed to place little Leiland in a loving, safe home and then did not act when there were significant concerns about his safety.
That is the big issue here. Social Services were aware that the placement had broken down and ignored this vital information.

Right. So your argument is that social services were perfect and beyond reproach in their decision to remove the child - but, what, it somehow isn't their fault they placed him in the care of a murderer? Because placing him in the care of someone who would murder him seems somewhat imperfect decision-making to me.

You can't have it both ways - either they are perfect and beyond question, or they are fallible and that applies as much to their decision to remove the child as to their decision to hand him to his murderer.

Never mind that abomination of a eulogy they drafted for the mother of a murdered child to read. That too was an appalling error of judgement by social services.

So on the whole, they clearly are very fallible and we should question everything about their involvement and their professional judgement.

You could find yourself tomorrow in a situation where someone thinks somebody else’s actions mean YOU may not be a fit parent.

But it's not someone else's actions that led to the decision to remove. It was the mother's actions, or lack of that led authorities to deem she wasn't fit to be a parent.