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[Tactical Genius]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7723042.stm
More staggering incompetance from Haringey social services leading to another death of a child under thier supervision.

Again, there is little accountability as everyone closes ranks in that department to cover for their lazy and useless workmates.

Reading stuff like this makes my blood boil.

[Bored Of Education]

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Not exactly an rational analysis there, TG. As it happens, I can't see anyone escaping from this without punishment where appropriate

The knee-jerk reaction of the press will, once again, obfuscate what are the root and branch changes needed. The key quote in the report is "He made various recommendations and demanded major legal and structural change." and it is here that the work needs to be done once the press have moved on from this

As with education, it is probably the case that the job needs to be moved away from "data entry" and supported with better training, better support and better provision. The best comment I heard this morning was that Haringey will probably have a nice clear paper trail leading to through this case that will not show how this baby died.

THere is absolutely no basis for your accusation of "lazy and useless workmates" and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself posting such crap on OTF. Back it up, man, or leave it out

I have dealt with many social workers on child protection departments in different parts of the country and your stereotype is ridiculous.

Yes, something has gone wrong here and it needs sorting but the fact remains that thousands of children are protected, even in Haringey, by people who are doing a job that most of us wouldn't want.

Once the majority of the press move on from this, they will be baying for lower taxes again and not seeing the consequences. Equally, the government will still expect people in charge of keeping children safe to spend all their time processing pieces of paper for their league tables.

Reading knee-jerk ill-considered stuff like yours makes my blood boil.

[Guest]

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Once the majority of the press move on from this, they will be baying for lower taxes again and not seeing the consequences.

And complaining about busybody interfering social services taking kids away from innocent parents because of PCGM hysteria that means you can't even take pictures of your kids in the bath etc etc.

[Wyatt Earp]

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Bored Of Discipline wrote:

Reading knee-jerk ill-considered stuff like yours makes my blood boil.

I refuse to believe that TG is capable of such a thing.

[Guest]

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As usual, dailymail.co.uk readers get straight to the heart of the matter:

Terrible, Ross and Brand get fired/suspended for their "prank" and these social workers missed this dreadful abuse and yet keep their jobs.

I hope the perpetrators have a rough ride in jail- they deserve it
- simon, Glasgow, 12/11/2008 09:34

[Bored Of Education]

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OTF readers aren't much better it seems

[Wyatt Earp]

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I think the Climbie case revealed real defects in Haringey Social Services, but it's less clear-cut here, at least so far. They were acting under legal advice to the effect that there wasn't enough evidence to take the child into care, and while that lack of evidence itself may be partly Social Services' fault, there's some evidence that in this case it's mainly health professionals who failed to spot what should have been spotted. At this stage, too, there don't seem to have been problems with communication among the professional disciplines. It looks more like a few key errors by individuals. I guess we'll see.

Sharon Shoesmith used to be at Education in Haringey, and while I've clashed with her as a parent governor, I'd say she's not the worst of them. My guess is that she'll have implemented the Laming recommendations pretty thoroughly, and that this will turn out not to be a case of lessons not having been learned, but of new lessons needing to be learned. Again, I guess we'll see.

There around 50 child deaths a year in the UK through abuse or negligence, and on the face of it, Shoesmith is entitled to wonder why Haringey is being singled out.

[ian.64]

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Reading knee-jerk ill-considered stuff like yours makes my blood boil.

Perhaps TG's comments were ill-informed, but I can understand his anger. Human fallibility of a huge kind led to the death of a baby who, if reports are substantiated, spent half its short life in enforced pain. 60 visits by council workers and not one query or suspicion - or is that my ill-informed impulse coming through?

I'm fucking angry about this, too. A sense of outrage isn't forbidden by law, last time I looked.

[Wyatt Earp]

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ian.64 wrote:

- or is that my ill-informed impulse coming through?

I think so, yeah, to be honest. The kid was identified as at risk, and Haringey had taken legal advice on taking him into care (and had been advised that they shouldn't). So at the moment, the evidence that this is Social Services' fuck-up is fairly weak (though that could of course change).

[Bored Of Education]

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I'm fucking angry about this, too. A sense of outrage isn't forbidden by law, last time I looked

No, it's not which is why I am outraged and fucking angry about TG's ill-informed remarks, the type of which when amplified and perpetuated through the media are more likely to make objective and considered restructuring of the system for the good harder

[Commodore]

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I’m with you on this one, BoD. The media have been entirely consistent in their demonising of all those who had contact with the family; it’s as if Haringey Social Services killed this child. They did not.

As the perpetrators of this cruelty could not be named for legal reasons, then the predictable next step on the part of the bag of shite that passes for media coverage is to attack those whose names could be linked in some way to the events that led to this death.

Now Children’s Minister Beverly Hughes wants more answers from Haringey Council, even though they appear to have co-operated fully with the trial. It’s yet another knee-jerk reaction from a politician who was the first to condemn Chris Morris after his Brass Eye on the media coverage of paedophilia even though she had not even seen this programme.

In fact it is Sharon Shoesmith, the media’s latest public enemy #1 who has said the only sensible thing during this whole affair, stating that social services can do nothing whenever someone has the mind to kill. But this will probably cut no ice with the media, who always look to a certain Helen Lovejoy for inspiration but who still doesn’t get the joke…

[Donnchadh Ghairdinéir]

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Wyatt Earp wrote:

Shoesmith is entitled to wonder why Haringey is being singled out

I was wondering that while listening to Shoesmith being grilled on the BBC. Because it's in that London it's more likely to be a story, maybe?

[Gerontophile]

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Could be because its, specifically, Haringey.

[Bruno]

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I'm going to spend the rest of today haunted by that story. Totally inconceivable. Thankfully the poor child died and was not forced to live with the irreparable scarring. Any parent (not to say any human being) will be asking him/herself unanswerable questions about this.

[Guest]

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What I find disturbing about this episode is that I would hope a Doctor or a social worker would be able to notice what would be, according to reports, fairly obvious signs of abuse. Correct me if I'm wrong but the baby's back was allegedly broken some time before it's death. How in the name of God was that missed?

I'm a parent and it was hard to watch those reports yesterday. How anyone could do this to a defenceless child completely escapes me. At the end of the day, the support services that should have been there for this poor baby failed miserably but the perpetrators of this crime should be made to pay and pay again.

[hobbes]

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In other news, a 15 year old was shot dead in Derby yesterday.
I think I must have missed that thread.

[Wyatt Earp]

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StuS wrote:

What I find disturbing about this episode is that I would hope a Doctor or a social worker would be able to notice what would be, according to reports, fairly obvious signs of abuse. Correct me if I'm wrong but the baby's back was allegedly broken some time before it's death. How in the name of God was that missed?

The consultant paediatrician concerned is under investigation by the GMC.

[Bruno]

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hobbes wrote:

In other news, a 15 year old was shot dead in Derby yesterday.
I think I must have missed that thread.

What is the point of this (honestly, not a rhetorical question)?

[Wyatt Earp]

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I'm also a parent, and I also found the reports almost impossible to watch.

But I don't think the demands we as a society make on Social Services are reasonable. We expect them never to fail to intervene in cases of abuse, and never to intervene where there isn't any. We require no false positives and no false negatives whatsoever. We require them to err on neither side. And we reserve the right to get furious with them, in advance of the evidence, whenever a mistake of either type has serious consequences.

And for pennies. Shoesmith must work on a shoestring. We don't require anything like this hitrate of, say, the criminal justice system, and we pay its professionals, what, five or ten times as much as social workers?

It's entirely possible that there were huge failings here, as there were with Climbie. But we don't yet know that, and people are going off half-cocked.

[Femme Folle]

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It's the boyfriend and the mother and the lodger who piss me off. I feel a lot more anger toward the mother than social services. She was the poor baby's first line of defense.

[Bored Of Education]

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Perhaps a bit of perspective on this.

We have had one case in school recently where, because of something not being done in school that was highlighted in June, a kid was injured (very luckily, not too seriously) and could quite easily have been killed.

As a parent governor, as WE will attest, I am partially responsible for children's safety in school and there is a possibility that the govenors will be seen to hold a certain amount of responsibility.

While it is not as much as other people in the management of the school, I am fucking furious and upset that, for whatever reason, a child came to harm when the cause was pointed out in a govenors' meeting 5 months ago.

I am not useless or lazy and neither were most of the people involved in the case. Most of the issue comes from lack of training, time, resources and money as will probably be the case in this recent death - as well as individual errors as well as violent individuals that really can't be legislated for.

This doesn't stop me from feeling guilty about what I could have done and I am sure everyone else involved feels the same.

Similar in this case, I expect there are lot of people in Haringey who feel as, if not more, angry.

[The Purple Cow]

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The last social worker who visited didn't notice the bruising on the kid's face because the mother had disguised them with chocolate. Is there such a thing as anti-naivity training?

[Bored Of Education]

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There are such numerous issues here that zeroing in on that is no use at all. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there has been individual error here but, scapegoating one or two people or even a council, will detract from the fact that the majority of social workers are working under huge case workloads with not enough time or resources to work efficiently

Why was legal advice given to not take the child into care? If social workers went against legal advice in taking children into care, there would be uunderstandable uproar

Why did the police not prosecute? OK, the social workers were fooled by the mother but were the police as well?

Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!

[NHH]

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Without wishing to oversimplify, there will always be problems here.

The precautionary principle to protect kids will conflict with the bias to leave kids with parents unless they absolutely have to remove them. The tabloid press manages to express both with fury without ever noting the inherent tension nor the problems created by an expectation that both are achievable without any difficulty.

The people working in that conflict are social workers and other health professionals, and they will often get it right, but like other in public service, their successes are private and their failures public.

[ian.64]

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But I don't think the demands we as a society make on Social Services are reasonable. We expect them never to fail to intervene in cases of abuse, and never to intervene where there isn't any.

Not at all, but Bored pointed out that there are a number of cases that are reasonably dealt with, it's just that when one slips throught the net like this one, emphasis and focus - through the media or just purely what one makes of it all - is strengthened and heightened immeasurably. Just the stark, blunt description of the act is harrowing.

And the fact that the doctor who neglected to recognise the child's true injuries (he reportedly thought the toddler was 'a bit grumpy') is being investigated by a medical board is confounding. Did anyone throughout the length of that case consider that?

Fuck me, I want those three bastards hit hard. This flash of useless anger does not come through kind permission of the Daily Mail.