17 year old found starved to death in Birmingham

[PinkPussyCat]

Just heard about this on the lunchtime ITV news... Apparently there were several other emaciated children found at the scene following a call to the emergency services.
They don't have any more details than that atm.

How can stuff like this be happening in the UK in 2008?

SS aren't saying if the family was known to them, but they have to hear about families to be able to act. How about the LEA who should have been visiting to make sure they were being taught properly, this was a fairly new arrangement. There are a lot of agencies who could/should have been involved.

How can the rest of the family not have known? Presumably a child doesn't starve to death in a few days. Also according to the local MP, an LEA representative had visited the family and flagged them but there was no follow-up visit by SS.

In fact, you could argue that money gets in the way of love and being a nice person.

You have to bear in mind the utter crap that the press sometimes write, I think, when considering some of the information we have been given. They do like to sensationalise issues. This morning the BBC described Handsworth as a "close-knit" community. I used to work in Handsworth and the population has always been described as transient - ie, people move on. It is a very poor area indeed with a lot of housing owned by Housing Associations. I wouldn't in anyway describe it as close knit - that is just media spin. ie, trying to say that everyone in Handsworth knew about it, so why didn't the social services, imho.

Also, the post mortem was reported as being inconclusive, so the starvation is still just a theory. However, there presumably is evidence of severe neglect.

I have no idea, since I know nothing about the case, but the parents may have had a mental illness which prevented them from being able to care for their children.

There are some awful things that happen behind closed doors and I feel that the social services are going to be blamed for this. I don't work in social services, but if you are responsible for a city as large and diverse as Birmingham, I should imagine it is a bit of a nightmare.

Of course, I too am merely speculating!!

QuintessentialShadow - I know what you are getting at... the appalling ignorance of the privileged of the realities of life of the poor...

I don't suppose there were many of those ignorant privileged people amoung this family's Handsworth neighbours, family and friends. There seems to be some implication here that someone 'privileged' should have stepped in here. How?

I don't think there is any such implication Vivace.

The implication, if any, is that the silos of British society are the root cause of such appalling events.

So what you seem to be saying Anna is that the poor are too feckless to look after themselves and their families.

All they need to do is hand around until some rich people come along and tell them how to care for their children?

If only this family had lived next door to a rich family, then everything would have been just fine...

... the appalling ignorance of the privileged of the realities of life of the poor...
what a load of rubbish. people dont neglect their kids because they are poor, there are clearly other reasons here and the fact that they are poor and live on a council estate has got nothing to do with it.

It is very sad. I do think that the lack of community we have in our society means that these awful things can go undetected.

A rich family would not have moved to this part of Birmingham, soapboax so that is not relevant. A rich family would hardly bothered about the going ons at the next doors poor family. And that is partly the point I am trying to make.

It is classical Marie Antoinette "Cant they eat Cake?"

Does anybody dispute that this family needed help?
Does anybody dispute the existence of really deprived areas in the UK?
Does anybody really think that deprived/poor people would have existed in a society where the wealth was more evenly distributed?

soapbox - you cannot possibly logically conclude that that is my implication, and it isn't.

so what you seem to be saying QuintessentialShadows is that if there were no poor people there would be no child neglect?

While Madamez has been her usual caustic self, I have to say I take her underlying point.

This is a case of parents abusing their children. There are clearly enormous issues here that haven't been divulged for public consumption yet, but however good our procedures and social organizations are, there will always be cases of abuse.

I'm not saying we should shrug our shoulders about it, but the media always seesm to want to headhunt a SW, or regulate HE or some such thing, when the basic issue here is that the parents failed monumentally in their duty of care, and they are the ones who rightly need to be prosecuted.

tmmj - there are actually millions of malnourished people in the UK, and the vast majority of them are malnourished because of poverty and/or ignorance.

There are parents who tragically allow their children starve to death, and there are parents who tragically allow their children to eat an appalling diet and become obese.

Poverty/ignorance are the root cause of both.

Actually, we have no idea what the 'root cause' of this case is. It seems the children disappeared from society very abruptly and this all happened pretty fast. We don't know why. The mother may have become severely mentally ill. She may have become terrorised by a sadistic new boyfriend. They may have been following some crazy quasi-religious purification ritual.
But as the children were clearly well-fed and a perfectly healthy weight until quite recently, I think we can safely say it is NOT because she was so uneducated she didn't know what to feed her kids and didn't notice them starving to death on the floor.

there are plenty of people that are not particularly poor who also feed their kids a diet of crap and there are quite a few poor people that dont let their kids starve to death.
this story has nothing to do with money, sometimes people have to take responsibility for their own actions. these people starved their child, it wasnt society in general or the middle classes or anyone else.

Agree Vivace. The family seemed 'normal' (i.e. children at school, seen around, out playing etc.) until a few months ago.

The father left at some stage.

Another man has been living there recently.

I assume it is something to do with those circumstances.

What I wonder about is that neighbours NOTICED the children taking bread left for the birds. And yet it doesn't appear that anyone did anything about it.

Poverty makes people pretty desparate. Give every person decent housing, good schooling, enough money to eat and dress apropriately (ie warm clothes for winter, not according to fashion) and I think a lot (not all) of depression, a lot of desperation will be eradicated, and make for a happier and less struggling population. With good schooling for all, enough information and a life without struggle is a pretty good start. But maybe I dont live in this reality. Maybe I have my head in the clouds, but having seen how people live without such distinc classes and without such deprivation in a society with less working hours, mostly just state schools, less unemployment and more financial freedom, it is easier to see that such things actually DONT happen everywhere.

Neglect will happen, whether rich or poor, but take the poverty element out, and I am pretty sure that the overall picture would be different. Some people lose themselves to stress, lack of money, frustration over housing,schooling, unemployment, and it gets to them in different ways than if they did not have such worries. People behave better if they are content. But that is just my take on it.

I agree Quint, that a good education is THE most empowering thing for poor people.

I'd just like to point out that our (I'm within the same SS area) area is the busiest and hardest worked in the country.

I also think people forget that social workers can't do anything on their own. They need someone to tell them when something is going on and they have to go to a judge before they can do much. There are also a lot of other professionals involved. The LEA should have made visits during that time which would have flagged something up. They have to sure the children are being taught properly.

Buda, what they said on the news was that the neighbour had alerted SS after the bread incidence.