Identity of Baby P's Mother To Be Revealed Tonight.

[Nancy66]

Along with that of her boyfriend.

I'm loathe to defend or protect her but that can't possibly lead to anything good can it?

The names have been fairly easy to find online for quite a while but there's a hell of a difference between having to actively look for them and having her picture splashed across the front page of The Sun as it undoubtedly will be.

I think we really do need to look at how people can escape sucj backgrounds and go on to have stable family lives.

It is something dp and I discuss a lot, we both come from highly dysfunctional, deprived abusive backgrounds and to be honest it has made parenting very very difficult. I was fine until I had my own child and as I tried to parent my own child it was blatantly obvious I did not have a clue. I had never been hugged or told by a parental figure that i was loved. I had never experienced a parent putting me first, someone showing an interest. After having my daughter memories of abuse came flooding back and I was just iuncapable of loving my daughter. I have had intensive help, much of it private and costing tens of thousands of pounds that has helped me become very close to the kind of parent that I want to be. I am still however quite emotionally cut off from my daughter unless I make an effort and I do think that comes from needing to be emotionally cold in order to survive abuse. My dp also does a similar thing, however we are both aware of it and have worked on it both woith each other and with dd.

I also again think education is a key, I can remember when we were homeless for a few months seeing children neglected all over the place, I mixed in a culture where it may not be the norm but it was accepted. People were just hopeless, there seemed to be no future for them or their children. Society had turned its back on them. I knew though that as long as I was strong I could have a future because I had my degree and teaching qualifications. I also had friends who were teachers, doctors,social workers, business people etc so even if I wanted to live in a house full of shit and dying animals ( which I didnt) the people around me would have commented and not let me get away with it. I also had the structure of getting up and going to work, I needed to look smart and groomed and my daughter also needed to look similar in order to go to nursery. If your life is nothing more than sitting in a shit filled house with other people who do not pass comment on your home or children you can sink into an "underclass" who neglect their children. Couple this with an abusive background which has caused mental instability and you end up with a baby p situation.

I am not excusing this woman, as someone who has escaped a very similar home lfe and managed to "make good' I would be the last person to excuse her. But if we do not understand we cannot make changes,

There are two issues here. One is how people develop in the way that creates these situations. The other is why was Baby Peter not taken into care.

I used to be Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council and so have managed to rummage out the finance records around December 2006 and January 2007 for Haringey from which I have written this analysis:

Haringey, like many authorities, has a target for the number of children in care which is kept for budgetary purposes. The target for March 2007 was 365 and for March 2008 352. In part the objective of reducing numbers in care is laudable as well of that of trying to reduce the weekly costs which have run at higher than £800 per child per week. On 3rd October 2006 it was noted that the deficit forecast for Haringey Local Council was £4.6 million which included a forecast overspend for Childrens Services of £2.3m ? including a figure of £500K for Looked After Children. The Executive Member for Finance said ?I will be working closely with the services concerned and I will be looking to them to identify ways to bring the budget back on target?. It was recognised at that time that the placements budget was running at 381 children and was very tight. The figure then crept up to 392 by November 2006.

By March 31st 2007 the financial situation had improved although there had still been an overspend of £500K on legal fees. The numbers of children in care had reduced and a new target was set of 352. In March at the end of the 2007-8 financial year, however, the numbers of children in care had increased back up to 373 (21 more than budget). It appears that controls on the number of care proceedings were tightened up in November 2006 with the 12 month rolling number from November 2006 going below 40 for the first time they were released in August 2007 and the number then went back up above 50 (where historically it has been in recent years) in September 2007.

Scary stuff, John.

in terms of the definition of 'taken into care', where does kinship care stand? is that just that a child has been removed from his parents?

and given to granny i mean

"taken into care" normally means a care order. The placement can vary.

A child can be subject to a care order, but placed with his or her parents.

I include S20 as a care order BTW. That is strictly not an order, nor is what people call "Police Protection Order", but is also not an order.

gotcha, i think. i think. i find the jargon deadly.

aaah. and with your cross-post you lost me entirely. thanks, though. it must be so hard to be on top of all this stuff, it's not friendly to the ordinary human being.

section 20 is not a care order. It is the way an LA can give a home to a child who doesn't have anyone willing or able to accommodate him/her. LA don't have parental responsibility under this section. If a parent challenges it, LA have to apply for care order.

That is perhaps a better explanation than mine.

gotcha. (i think etc).

i appreciate the time you've both taken to explain that. and am desperate to know if you post on here under another name, jh. if it's abetadad i'll slit my own throat...

My dp comes from a very abusive and horrendous background. He was born into a deprived family, in a deprived sink estate, his family have very low iq and no ambition or life outside thier street.

His mum abandoned him at the age of 3 to the care of his grandparents and we think he was the result of incest between his mum and his grandad (but this can't be proved one way or another)He witnessed abuse of his mother by his grandfather several times, both his uncles used to beat the shit out of him and he never had enought to eat. He just survived cos he had too. The house was just appalling (still is) dog shit all over the floor, rubbish, human sick and shit you name it.

He never had christmas presents, a tree, normal family outings, birthday parties.. come to think of it fuck all really.

The first proper loving family christmas he ever had was at the age of 19 with his ex and her family, She later told me that he was like a child, he just couldn't believe his eyes.

How he has survived is beyond me. His brother hasn't he has spend his life in prisons for car theft, burglary, assualt, kidnap, and also for threatning to murder his baby niece (Dp firstborn) at her christening.

Dp has many scars yes but due to the love he had from his godparents who were there from birth, his ex girlfriend and her family he had a chance of normality.

Not all children who are brought in this environment go on to do the same to thier children but I can see how easy it is for the cycle to go on and on. He can't understand why he is ok (to an extent) and his brother is not but I suppose it depends on character.

Edam I think your posts are spot on and I've noticed that some of you can't quite believe that there are so many children live in such awful conditions but I can I've seen it.

he worst Ive ever seen was a friend of mine who sold her kids bedding to pay for her abusive boyfriends mobile phone. And then his dog attacked her 6 yr old ds and he had to have 15 stitches in his arm..

Society is failing our children and until a radical change is brought about on how we treat and view our children then there will be more baby peters.

I for one am glad thier names and faces have been made public..I never want to forget what happened to him and I hope that much good will come from his awful death.
+

It's beenhard to write that but like dp said to me I've kept things secret for years I didn't speak out as a child cos this was normal life for me.. It didn't occur to me that it wasn't

How many other children are saying that right now?

my brother was also abused in a childrens home in the southeast of england..

Both my brothers were taken into care when I was 5, I was left behind. They both have had horrendous lives.

I will stop posting now

That's really sad, it's sickening what children are going through everyday. In a way I'm sorry I've read this thread because I know I'll be thinking about it for a very long time. That picture of baby P is so haunting, what the poor little thing was going through and he didn't even know any different. I don't believe that people capable of doing this are able to be anyway rehabilitated so they should be kept locked up. The picture of the mother makes me sick. She gave birth to that little boy, there are so many couples out there that could have loved him the way she should have. She is scum.
There are threads on here all the time about whether to intervene with children been shouted at and verbally abused on the streets or in shops etc by their parents, make you wonder how many of those situations are 100 times worse behind closed doors.

oh sheep, that's so terrible, and so wonderful that his nature triumphed over their nurture. give him a squeeze from me.

(btw as a highly innappropriate aside, you and gibboninaribbon are my two favourite-ever MN names and i am highly delighted to see you both back and posting. )

i havent read all the thread but why there isnt any mention of baby P's father?
didnt he have any right to see him or something?
or if he did see him didnt he notice any injuries?

i havent seen his biological father mentioned in the news, either....

But attitudes like this are the sort that will mean this kind of thing continues. Exactly how relevant is it to anything that Tracey Connolly is overweight? Are they really trying to suggest that fat impoverished women are all going to be child abusers? Is it not a little bit more relevant that Tracey Connolly was abused and neglected by her mother, taken into 'care' and abused further, and then married by another predator (what else would you call a 33 year old man who marries a 17 year old girl - there doesn't seem to have been very much mention of his contribution to what happened to Peter Connolly ie Tracey Connolly's older children were taken into care while she was still married to this man...).
The implications of this piece - that fat ugly unemployed chavs torture their children to death - make it more likely that well-educated, comfortably off abusers will get away with it more and that parents who are poor, domestically untidy and not very attractive to look at will be assumed to be abusing and neglecting their children even when they are not. Not helpful at all.

As a complete aside, and probably not terribly relevant - how come they were living in such a lovely house? was a local authority one?

It might be relevant to why the older children had been taken into care earlier.

I remember reading that when the relationship broke down, Tracey lived in a flat temporarily. I don't suppose many councils have four-bed houses sitting vacant so perhaps the children were housed elsewhere until something suitable came up?

SGB - I think the fact she sat around drinking vodka and watching porn is relevant and helps to build a picture of the woman - that's the job of the newspaper. It was a profile piece.

It is the job of a newspaper to provoke outrage and I think, sometimes, that's necessary - we need people to be angry.