Welcome to another week.
Javed Khan, Chief Executive of Children’s charity Barnardo’s has told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that children who escape from care do so because traffickers “feed them a web of lies, leading them to fear the authorities.”
The claim comes after statistics revealed that 16% of children referred to Barnardo’s own fostering network had been sexually exploited or abused, and 17% were trafficked. These figures are likely to be a conservative estimate, as it is often difficult to assess the full extent of children being exploited.
The Reuters article published in Turkey’s Daily Sabah, goes on to reference Department of Education statistics which show that over 50,000 children in England are in foster care, with thousands disappearing more than once.
2017 was also the worst year for the UK in relation to child trafficking, with the UK being the most prominent country of origin for children being trafficked. It was a record breaking effort, with the UK seeing the highest number of child trafficking cases from any country in the world this year.
And yet very little effort has been made to find out why children in care in the UK really go missing in the first place.
A 2013 report from Research in Practice is one of a handful of investigations which has tried to look at root causes of children running away from care homes and foster homes. The researchers suggest that Placements may be an issue. Their report tells us:
“Placement moves and instability in care can leave CYP [Children and Young People] lacking a sense of identity or agency, which they may try to re-establish through running away. Changing school at the same time as changing placement may increase feelings of instability… Supporting carers to stabilise placements, making well matched placements in the first instance and forward planning to avoid emergency placements can all support placement stability.”
The report goes on to detail several forms of placement which are routinely used, and which place children at much higher risk of running away from care and into the arms of traffickers.
Our question to you this week then, is just this: who is to blame for children going missing whilst in care?
A big thank you to Dana for alerting us to this story.
Researching Reform 
Without a doubt in many cases its Local authorities to blame for taking children from parents when they didnt need to. Local Authorities are more interested in Targets than anything else. what we need to find out is how many LAs are still receiving financial incentives from the Govt for meeting Targets. Many secrets have been kept from the Uk public and its time for the Truth to come out so that we can make our own mind up as to what we think of what has been going on in secrecy for decades. Lies Deception and Big Money going in Back pockets is the most likely Truth.
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There are many incentives, many Social Workers, Foster Carers, Contact Workers and others involved in the child stealing industry have the ultimate ambition to own their own Fostering/Adoption Agencies, which are literally making millions from this disgusting system, indeed the vast majority of these agencies are in some way owned by such people and their relatives.
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Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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Reblogged this on National Inquiry into Organised, Orchestrated & Historic Child Sexual Abuse.
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A great many of them are “Running Away” to try to get back to their families, whom they did not want to leave in the first place.
I have seen with my own eyes and heard testimonies from many others of children literally being “Dragged Kicking and Screaming” from their families either by Social Workers, Contact Workers or even The Police.
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I have just returned from speaking at the London Ambulance Service conference and was followed by 2 ladies from Children’s Society speaking about trafficking .BOYS outnumber girls who are trafficked. MANY Vietnamese boys are trafficked to UK to grown cannabis. Nail bars run by Asians are often used as a front for money laundering and cannabis . I
UK is not the largest exporter of cannabis because of the labour from these trafficked young lads.
The CARE system is anything BUT caring and not fit for purpose the systems in UK are crumbling and a mess quite frankly including the legal system !!! Police then tske back missing children to where they ran away from!! Thousands of children go missing every year because of CSE! The care homes are full of vulnerable youngsters and some of those themselves are abusing
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It saddens me to see these kind of statistics as they have an been ongoing issue for years and yet nothing tangible is done by the government to remedy the situation.
Who is to blame?
The Government ultimately.
Why?
The Government can change the laws to make child protection more family oriented.
Why haven’t they?
A lot of money is made. A lot of people are employed in Child Protection and the Family Courts. The government say they pay out billions in child protection but a high percentage returns back to them in other ways like tax.
A lot of noise is made by the Government about how wonderful the system is but the reality for the children is very different. The government won’t admit failings are because of how the system is set up and interpreted by Social Workers or by the people employed to look after the child.
When tragedies occur, they claim lessons are learnt, but nothing really changes.
The child experiences many systematic tragedies from the very start of their care journey. They lose everything they have known before in a nano second. Their immediate family, their extended family, their home, their personal belongings, their friends, their school, their routine, to be forcefully ejected and thrown, by an unfamiliar social worker, into a totally different environment, with new “parents” who have their routines, in their home. Food tastes and smells are unfamiliar as well. In my opinion this is why children become so disoriented & lose the their identity. It’s the foundation of mental illness too. Metaphorically speaking the rug has literally been pulled out from under their very existence. Their new home becomes a prison from which to escape, sooner or later.
Not to minimise the effects of maltreatment by some parents on the child but the governments ‘remedy’ is far more harsher & abusive and its effects ripple on over decades if not throughout the child’s lifetime. It would be far better for social workers to work at supporting the child to keep within its own family but this won’t happen unless there is a total shake up of the child laws & attitudes.
The government has lost its way in child protection and is losing the battle to contain it. The statistics repeatedly show the system is not working for the child but as long as it keeps working for those making money it will continue, despite the whole system breaking down and damaging those thousands of children caught up in it.
Albert Einstein (?) said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over & over again and expecting a different result. Shame on the Government for consistently doing the same thing in child protection despite being aware of the statistics that prove it’s not working for the children they claim they protect.
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“Albert Einstein (?) said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over & over again and expecting a different result”
Im with Einstein. its insanity, corruption and Greed all rolled into one.
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Here are the lump sum fees payable in 2008 to outside of LAs adoption agencies, now, as far as I am aware all adoptions are on this basis
Where an external placement is made, an inter-agency fee is charged.
This fee enables the agency, which has recruited and approved the prospective adopters to recoup their costs.
The fees in 2008 were:
• £12,660 for an adoptive family approved by another LA (from 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2008)
• £19,889 for families from VAAs with an additional fee of £3,315 to cover post adoption services (the post adoption support module).
London LAs and VAAs are also able to charge an additional 10% London weighting
2006 Deloitte to review local authority commissioning of VAAs1. This review made the following key points:
Click to access rk6582afinalreport.pdf
These fees are now up to £30,000 min per child upper amount unlimited.
They appear to have been disguised as encouraging adoption of those hard to adopt but are payable, regardless, on the out of LA basis, with a larger lump sum on a discretionary basis for the older and disabled.
Click to access Inter-agency_Adoption_and_Subsidy_of_the_Inter-Agency_Fee.pdf
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Successive governments since Blair, have put in place media propaganda, research, and law to aid the speedy transfer of as many as possible into the care system.
Now doubling from 2010 to over 1600 per month, with apparently a 98% up from 80% then success rate for care applications.
Increasingly, LA child protection services are being put into special measures and privatised.
Adoption is outsourced to Company agencies who also do the family assessments, so a huge conflict of interests, as they are paid £30,000 minimum on adoption and £8,000 if they don’t recommend it.
The Inter agency adoption fees were introduced in 2008, but even before them LAs were rewarded on Adoption Targets score cards introduced by Blair.
The system has been deliberately created to make maximum profit on a commercially aware basis and is only accountable to a state whose policy is to do this.
That is why LAs last year sought, via legislative changes, to exempt themselves from liability to former children in care, who were suing them for damages for their abusive time in care.
The same is happening in Adult Social Services.
It will continue until someone stops it. .
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Reblogged this on | truthaholics and commented:
Another damning indictment of foxes running henhouses at taxpayers expense.
Call it for what it is: state-sponsored kidnapping!
What else should we expect when both arms of the state are so often detached from reality, ie, the executive in the form of the local authority reporting fake facts as opinion evidence and the judiciary in the form of the judge at court rubber-stamping it?
Where is the public outcry??
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Grooming scandals, and the inept, process driven world of adoption exposed by Re K ( A Child: Post Adoption Placement Breakdown ) [2012] EWHC show child protection services remain systemically flawed, but still the government refuses to act, instead limiting judicial scrutiny of, and intervention into these services by a 26 week care proceedings limit.
The state promotes adoption, but has not yet monitored the number of adoption breakdowns, and encourages care orders, but cannot cope with, afford or even trace the over 67,000 orphans, it has now created and parents at a cost of £ 3 billon per annum.
75% of English residential homes are privately owned- 5 made £ 30million profit last year. Yet the £200,000 per annum, paid per child, does not even provide a proper 24 hour service, last year the police spent £ 40 million searching for 10,000 children who had absconded from care , the Department of Education’s published the figure at 930, with 80 still missing.
The above, is the beginning of an Article I wrote published in the Solicitors Journal in October 2012, and sadly, even on the net is no longer available as SJ has closed.
The rest of the Article, I can put in if this blog doesn’t mind it, is the story of K the child adopted in the above case .
It is rare to have the facts of an adoption breakdown case, but here exceptionally, the Judge lifting reporting restrictions do to the failures of the various LAs.
It is a sad tale of a poorly organised and supported adoption resulting in terrible abuse to Katie who escaped from a care home she was placed in and was raped at 14.
And in the last 5 years things have only worsened.
Adoption/fostering/care homes are a huge profit making unaccountable industry that appears not fit for purpose, will post the rest of my article it should be put on the net if you want.
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Reblogged this on Musings of a Penpusher and commented:
Time to attach responsibility and make it stick where it should. For too long highly paid officials have been sheltered from the consequences of their negligence at best, and downright complicity at worst.
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Obviously social workers backed up by family court judges are the culprits responsible for taking children from loving but sometimes imperfect families. They then give them to complete strangers to feed the highly profitable fostering and adoption industries !
The result being that these children are seldom loved and frequently abused or even killed.
As long as sane and law abiding parents have their children snatched by unscrupulous social service lackeys and then taken over by corrupt organisations like Barnardos most of those children will tend to run,to escape, the horror of it all …………….
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As always you only speak the truth Ian.
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Here is the story of ‘Katie’ in Re K ( A Child: Post Adoption Placement Breakdown ) [2012] EWHC and what happened when her adoption broke down.
Re K involved the removal of four year old ‘Katie’ from her poor parenting, fragile mentally mother and five siblings, to first over a year in foster care.
And then to adoption by middle aged, middle class parents with their own two teenage girls, and finally to a residential placement/school, where Katie, at 14, suffered her most serious harm- rape by an acquaintance on one of her frequent absconsions.
The state promised Katie ‘a permanent family, who could offer her stability and unconditional love.
’To maximise her chances , the Coventry adoption social worker presented Katie in glowing terms, preferring her foster carers’ opinion, that she was ‘open and truthful’, to the Bradford guardian’s that she was’ sly and devious at times, and ‘has taken things that do not belong to her’.
The adoption panel were unaware that Katie had regularly witnessed her mother’s self – harm, and her older sister’s sexual abuse, and possibly her own, details only retrieved from her social work files four years later.
Her adoptive parents had stated in their application they ‘[did] not feel able to take a child who has been sexually abused’’, and admitted they would not have adopted Katie had they known of possible sexual abuse..
They were also only approved to adopt a child with’ no major emotional problems’ ,yet Katie, presented, ’as indiscriminate in her relations with adults’, ‘extremely needy’, and in need of ‘a good level of support following placement’.
Despite this Katie’s psychological assessment was glowing, stating she ‘could make secure attachments ’, but was written by the psychologist advising her foster parents, who had never met Katie.
A proper assessment was essential to ensure Katie was capable of forming the permanent attachments needed for a successful adoption.
Within three months of the final adoption order, following a glowing placement report, Katie now 7, was suspended from school for downloading pornography.
Three years later Katie was taking things, self- harming, absconding from home day and night, and blaming her mother for not being able to live with her birth family.
Only then, at age 11, did the post adoption support team arrange a consultation with CAMHS, access Katie’s social work files to begin her life story work and provided parenting strategies, which only served to decrease her parents’ warmth and empathy, so that they complained this was not what they ‘ signed up for’.
CAMHS’s diagnosis of a’ huge attachment disorder ‘, ought to have been obvious to an informed observer, let alone an adoption support team.
CAMHS commenced Art Therapy, and advised Katie’s parents to change their parenting style.
A Family and Adolescent Support Services worker, initially ignorant of attachment disorders, worked with Katie. This ‘ support’ proved ineffective.
A court expert was to explain why. Katie was ‘yearning to be accepted and nurtured for herself’. As her parents’ focus on high achievement… [did] not equip them easily to accept Katie unconditionally’. They trusted their own high achieving teenage daughters, which left Katie feeling a failure, and not part of the family.
The report of the Bradford Adoption Panel had already prophetically stated, ‘she would benefit from being in a home where she does not have to compete for attention’, but had not been ignored,
However with therapy, common sense and proper support, costing far less than Katie’s residential school, Katie could still have remained part of her new family and thrived.
Instead social services had held a professional meeting and noted, ‘professionals have offered as much as they can. Nothing else seems to have worked, only option is bring her into care’. Declared the parents, ‘high risk abusive parents’, and arranged for Katie to be moved to a residential school over 100 miles away.
The parents knew nothing of these meetings or intentions, nor the effect of the subsequent care conference, despite working together to safeguard children guidance, and the accepted importance by Social Services of Katie maintaining her relationship with her parents.
Before Katie had been due to be driven by her parents, she absconded, was found by the police, who in breach of their promise not to, drove Katie in the middle of the night to her residential school.
As Katie was angered by this, she complained her father had assaulted her, (- grabbed her in restraint for her own protection her, and to guide her to his car), both parents were arrested, but never charged.
Social services maintained a zero tolerance to restraint, advising her parents to let Katie abscond, wait 30 minutes, and ring the police.
This, together with advice not to show anger, paradoxically resulted in Katie assuming her parents did not care, escalating her bad behaviour.
But by contrast restraint was allowed and used in her residential school by strangers.
Within a year of being in the children’s home Katie had absconded six times , been raped by an acquaintance, been physically restrained, spent a night in the police cells after an assault on a carer , and been fitted with a contraceptive implant, without her parents knowledge. Katie was not yet 15.
Although at the final hearing the parents conceded the care application, the judge insisted they fully contest.
And whilst he, and the expert agreed, that the threshold criteria was satisfied, Katie had suffered significant harm, and was beyond parental control, this was not due to her parents ‘punitive regime’. In any event they agreed with judicial guidelines, that apportioning blame is not generally in a child’s best interest.
As a care order could only worsen the parents’ relationship with the social services, and force them to say goodbye, and have ‘a very negative impact on Katie’, the judge preferred wardship, but felt restricted by 100 (2) (b) Childrens Act 1989, which appears to exclude such orders where a child is accommodated, or subject to a care order.
The Ministry of Justice’s Practice Direction 12 D, however, is far less restrictive, and states wardship should not be commenced unless it is clear that the issues concerning the child cannot be resolved under the Childrens Act 1989.
Thus it allows wardship, whenever there is no other means of satisfactorily resolving a care dispute, regardless of the current status of the child. Wardhip therefore, could and should allow ‘a legal framework which kept all parties on equal terms’, as it did in K Children 2012 EWHC, where it achieved the best outcomes for a family with four severely disabled children.
Had Katie’s parents applied for a wardship order, they would not need leave, and Katie might still be part of her family, instead, her parents were replaced by an independent reviewing officer, an executive of the social services, whose only check on their employers’ care of Katie is to refer them to CAFCASS for breach of Katie’s human rights. And to date no action has been taken against any authority for such breach.
A&S v Lancashire County Council [2012] EWHC saw a local authority sued for breach of two boys’ Articles 3, 6 and 8 rights, in forcing them to endure 77 and 96 different placements and abuse. Their IRO blamed a tick-box culture, non-existent supervision, inadequate training and a 200 caseload.
Such freestanding human rights actions are often overlooked by parents and children, because of a belief that there is a high threshold for engagement. But whilst the ECHR appears subsumed by the need to act in a child’s best interest, this interest is often best served by the maintenance of the family unit, and on such analysis, most interference by the state may be deemed substantial.
Katie’s parents could have sought a remedy for breaches of their, and Katie’s Article 8 rights, due to the social services procedural unfairness, and the removal of Katie into care. And clever injunctive use of Art 8 might ensure Katie’s future care was fit for purpose.
We will never know what happened to Katie, nor of the thousands in similar positions, who due to their attachment disorders ‘use a compulsively promiscuous strategy to avoid genuine intimacy’.
Hale LJ has stated that ‘If the state is to interfere in the child’s right to respect for his family life, it has a duty to use its best endeavours to make good what it has taken away’. It certainly did neither for Katie, nor for many missing or abused in care.
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