The latest child welfare items that should be right on your radar:
- Zahawi: take children into care when ‘any inkling of harm’
- Zahawi oral Statement to the House of Commons following the death of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
- COVID-19: Pandemic increases society’s divisions with children in the north of England poorer, worse educated and more likely to die young, says report (Report can be read here)
Researching Reform 
I despair. Typical knee jerk response from a politician to appease the publics outcry arising from the murder of Arthur from his Dad & girlfriend. I don’t think he has thought this out. The murderers have been tried & sentenced & instead of drilling down to how Arthur’s plight was repeated missed by those who could have prevented his death, Zahawi’s response is to take more children into care at the fist whiff of concern. Maybe from birth all children should be sent to government controlled facilities for the prevention of child abuse. Then he would only have to keep a check on the carers!
This case is very different from the majority. Most parents who maltreat their children don’t desire or go on to kill them. The social workers were warned repeatedly of concerns in Arthur’s case but decided there was no need for further action. Why is that not being addressed? One wonders why this scenario keeps repeating itself despite lessons learned.
Lack of training? Maybe the training given is not satisfactory & might need a more robust FBI type training to deal with deception.
One day I might hear that the government will help & support parents instead of taking children into care. Taking children into care does damage them & should be a last resort but that shouldn’t stop social workers supporting families that might be going through bad times in order to prevent children going into care.
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Who decides if there is what Zahawi calls an inkling? He makes no distiction between “risk” of something that has not happened( and probably never will) and actual harm confirmed by medical examination;.
Social workers tend to leave battered children to die so that they can concentrate on taking happy healthy children for non existent risk and add them to their official adoption scorecards !
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See – they let a child die and everyone wants to give them more resources – and even greater powers to remove on no evidence.
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I don’t think social workers deliberately let a child die but when it happens they can justify why they take so many children into care with a refrain of, “Look what happens if we don’t take away the child”. This is the propaganda fed to the general public & it works because they don’t know an alternative. It creates a need to ring fence more money that steadily increases every time something traumatic happens & gives more power to social workers. They never admit responsibility & deflect blame away from themselves. What is surprising is their track record isn’t good despite all the platitudes given by MPs & others. The child is taken into care but as an adult how do they fare? Sadly not too well, poor education & a high proportion end up as alcoholics or in prison.
Why would any government give more money for a broken system? Why are they not trying to radically change the system & work with families? Just think of the time freed up if they weren’t always writing reports & going to courts, they may be able to visit a family more often, especially in cases like Arthur’s, where the concerns from others were coming thick & fast. The social workers may have realised things were more serious had they visited more frequently.
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What makes me angry is the SS crying about funding cuts, but there is more than enough funding poured into the child care system every year. the problem is that LAs are wasting most of it dragging innocent parents through the family courts while real cases like Arthur are sidelined. when will this be addressed.
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