Tag Archives: care

Baby P

It is really quite striking how much of a frenzy there is surrounding the tragic case of Baby P. I have made no effort in this blog to keep up with the astonishing amount of news coverage of the case and of the question of child protection generally – I have a full time job after all. But what I can tell you is that by virtue of posting something about Baby P last week combined with the magic of google this blog has had one of the busiest weeks ever. My stats page tells me that ‘Baby P’ is pretty much all anyone is googling at the moment.

As yesterday’s OFSTED report apparently tells us (I say apparently because I haven’t had time to read it, and because frankly it’s not news to me) this kind of tragedy is going on all over the country. Sadly many kids are killed by their carers, and no doubt sometimes this could have been prevented. But as the slathering media machine churns on and on  I am beginning to feel a little bit like the gawping at the spectacle of Baby P is not only unhealthy in itself but a little bit disrespectful to all those other forgotten babies and children. I’m afraid what is being reported as ‘shocking’ to many of us is probably ‘normal’ for many many unhappy children.

Baby P

So many words bandied about by so many people. Big, descriptive, superlative words. Unimaginable. Horrific. And so it is. But ‘unspeakable’ (Times Leader earlier this week)? Plainly it isn’t, as everyone is doing just that.

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A lot of talk about ‘risk’. What is sometimes forgotten is that there are two sorts of risk. The risk of leaving a child where it is. And the risk of removing a child from its parents when it wasn’t justified. It’s a tough call in many cases. Even if something has gone very wrong in the operation of the child protection system in Haringey (and we await the verdict of the various enquiries and investigations that have been peremptorily embarked upon to shed light on that) these are difficult decisions to make. Sometimes social workers get it wrong, thankfully most of the time errors of judgment do not result in such horrific consequences.

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Of course this must be investigated, but it does make you think – how many more social workers, how much more training and support for them could be provided with the money spent on attempting to find an answer to the question of how on earth this could have happened?

 

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The Family Law Week post on this case links to a number of the main sources of commentary and information in respect of Baby P. Family Lore also posts on the topic here.

The Unverifiable Truth

Another article from Camilla Cavendish at The Times today about Family Justice. And again more heart rending tales of injustice which are completely unverifiable. She writes of Ann who was accused by her violent ex husband of having Munchausens by proxy (Fabricated or induced illness) – on the basis of her account it seems a terrible wrong has been done to Ann and her family in the removal of their children on the basis of false allegations. But in order to conclude that this is so (as Camilla Cavendish has done) one must assume firstly that Ann did not suffer from FII – the tenor of the article tends to suggest that the Munchausen’s allegation is self-evidently untrue because it was initially made by a violent ex-partner.

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I don’t know what the true facts are – and in point of fact neither does Camilla Cavendish. And although this unverifiability is itself one of the points the article is seeking to highlight – is it responsible journalism when emotive stories of this kind are presented as factual reporting when the sole source of information is the individual most likely to see things in a highly subjective way – the parent whose child has been removed against their wishes?

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