Ps And Qs: David Cameron Joins The Baby P Debate
BABY P. No rest yet. The court case has yet to be played out. The mother, step-father and lodger have yet to be sentenced.
Children’s Secretary Ed Balls has seen a report into the case. He has made his views know. But as is the fashion in modern politics, no-one makes a decision and moves on, they only join the debate.
His lack of a firm hand and inability to deliver a final ruling allows papers like the Sun to emote and start campaigns. They join the debate. We all join the debate. And nothing gets done. Not really.
Granted, Haringey council leader George Meehan has resigned, so too has Liz Santry, the borough’s “cabinet member for children”.
Note to Gordon Brown: the buck stops at the top.
And while Balls worries about not doing enough and doing too much, the Sun bangs on.
Only one of the four women the Sun wanted sacked has gone – although Sharon Shoesmith has only been suspended from her post as Haringey’s head of children’s services and still receives her £110,000-a-year wage.
“IT’S NOT ENOUGH,” says the paper that had made a mawkish land grab for Baby P’s remains.
But it is enough for David Cameron, who is so desperate to get the Rupert Murdoch’s Sun to support his Conservative Party at the next election, engages in a spot of ineffectual, meaningless, emotive pap Balls would be proud to call his own. The piece is equipped with a shot of Cameron pursing his lips like he means it.
In “And now full truth must be revealed” Cameron writes:
His face seems so familiar now, but it is still incredibly moving.
More than 1.3million signed The Sun Baby P petition, each name a cry for justice. Yesterday, those cries were answered. The sackings, suspensions, resignations were long overdue.
Thank God the Government answered our call for the independent inquiry that was needed.
Each name is a cry for vengeance. The Sun’s petition calls for four social workers to be sacked. And what is an independent enquiry but a sop to decisiveness, deferring any decisions to an anomalous body?
Cameron has read the report:
It reveals serious mistakes that led to Baby P’s death. It is vital that other professionals learn from these mistakes.
Mistakes, eh? Indeed. And what can you do, Cameron?
What have they got to hide? Why can’t the public read the facts in full? What kind of culture puts safeguarding the system before children, protecting bureaucrats before our babies?
Dunno. Dunno. Dunno. Can we join the debate and find out?
The army of Sun readers who signed their names to that petition want answers to these questions, and so do I.
The army has a celebrity voice. “Join the debate!” is his battle cry.
And while the politicos talk and talk and jostle to show who cares the most, nothing gets done and gush mourning sickness, nothing gets done…
Posted: 2nd, December 2008 | In: Key Posts, Politicians Comments (19) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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January 17th, 2009 at 7:53 am
[...] politics with paedos and kiddie haters… Posted at 7:53 am by Paul [...]
December 12th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
PLEASE STOP EDITING MY ARTICLES OR DELETE THEM.
YOU ARE UNFAIR.
I WILL NOW BE PLACING IT ON ANOTHER WEBSITE
WHICH YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO INTERVENE WITH.
OVERSUPPLIED MF
December 6th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
well done liz davies.
the common assessment framework & contactpoint are disgraceful.
to see how strongly i feel on child protection issues you should read my comment on the British Fritzl page- who, unlike the “Baby P” ***edit*** murderers, still has not been publicly exposed- and the social workers are not always at fault but as long as this CAF/ICS “database state” is in force, instead of a CPR and proper distinction between s17 and s47 inquiries, 1) children will continue to be abused and slip through without proper SPECIALIST services from trained child PROTECTION officers (the plain english meaning of those words, not “safeguarding” and the “tier 5 services” ECM pyramid which suggests fostering and reading CAF entries is more “specialist” than a psychologist/consultant paediatric doctor). 2) children, and especially teenagers, will avoid using sensitive services such as sexual health and educational psychology when they need them because they know Government surveillance is needlessly in force on everybody. it’s like hitting a target with a blunt sledgehammer instead of a nice sharp blade.
who wants their school’s “pupil support manager” or “CP coordinator” to be reading all their intimate files whenever they want without having a justification? and finally 3) the government is hypocritically breaking their own data privacy legislation, undermining the right of parents to consent to “information sharing”, undermining doctor patient and therapist-client confidential relationships, and spinning the public a lie about it by claiming it is linked with the Climbie case when in fact it was mooted long before that.
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Chenier
I agree. I think psychs would be a good idea.
December 2nd, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Thank you, Karen; it’s worth seeing it here in full because it does underline the magnitude of the problems. If we assume that the Laming recommendations would work, if they were implemented, then we may be making yet another mistake, and yet more children may be left with no-one to stand between them and the sadist.
I still maintain that until child protection teams have input from forensic psychiatrists they are unlikely to recognise their own in-built biases…
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I should’ve done a link - but it looked really short on the Guardians’ website. Sorry.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:58 pm
This has been nabbed from the Guardian :
(where’s the policy coming from though - is there a think tank that needs assassinated? Does anyone know?)
A baby dies, a million Sun readers sign a petition and a government swiftly exploits a new platform to further its Every Child Matters agenda, which separates prevention from protection and focuses on children as at risk of being a trouble to society, rather than as victims of child abuse.
Central to this policy is state surveillance of children’s lives through the mass accumulation of data about them. Social workers are required to conduct detailed assessments of children and their families on the basis of concerns, rather than harm, and spend most of their time entering the information onto computer databases.
Those of us who have studied the demise of child protection systems since the mid-90s and the neglect of children at high risk of abuse have predicted tragedies again and again.
Lord Laming’s statement that he was struck by the robustness of the foundation on which current children’s services are based demonstrates how out of touch he is with the impact of his own recommendations, which have led to serious flaws in current practise. Laming, who chaired the Victoria Climbié enquiry, is to review the implementation of his recommended reforms but what is urgently needed is a multi-agency panel of child protection experts to examine professional practise post-Climbié.
The Baby P case demonstrated the exact same dynamic that Lisa Arthurworrey found herself implementing in responding to Victoria Climbié’s carers when she followed the family support model so vigorously promoted by government.
Arthurworrey said she thought child protection was only for emergencies and, despite numerous indicators of child abuse at the point where she began to work on this case, child abuse investigation was sidelined as a result.
The Victoria Climbié enquiry led to a raft of new reforms which the children’s secretary, Ed Balls, so confidently said have significantly strengthened the framework for safeguarding children. Much depends on the definition of the word safeguarding, but it has to be recognised that these reforms have been imposed at the expense of protecting children from harm.
Social work assessments now take priority and require completion within strict timescales. While these processes, rather than child protection
investigations, go into action, there is high risk of children remaining
unprotected and perpetrators being hidden from professional view.
Most reporting of the Baby P case refers to his name being on the child protection register yet last April, on Laming’s recommendation, this register was abolished and child protection professionals lost their most important child protection procedure.
The register statistics, particularly related to sexual and physical abuse, had already fallen dramatically as government targets forced authorities to drive the numbers down. Every device was used to remove children’s names, such as them being already in care or of an age to supposedly “take care of themselves”.
Balls will no doubt try to convince us that a child who is the subject of a child protection plan is just the same thing as registration - when it clearly is not.
Some authorities have retained the alert system to hospitals and police identifying children at high risk of harm, but in others this vital alarm bell no longer rings.
IT consultants have replaced the specialist child protection manager role as custodian of the register and what was a highly guarded list is now far more widely accessible within the database systems. Abusers will have little difficulty in gaining sensitive information about vulnerable children.
Agencies failed to work together to protect Baby P, but it was Laming’s report that recommended police should focus on criminal investigation, which diverted police attention from the joint investigation with social workers of significant harm.
It was surely this policy shift that led to Haringey whistle-blower Nevres Kemal being alone as a social worker investigating a case of child sexual abuse based mainly on children’s statements.
Very few child abuse referrals begin with evidence of crime. Social workers need to work closely with the police at every stage of a child protection investigation not just at the clear moments when a crime may have been committed. Whether the police remained involved throughout the many incidents of injury to Baby P or solely intervened at moments of “crime” requires close scrutiny.
Laming in his review will surely have to admit that recommending the abolition of the register, the change in police role and the database for every child in the UK, has undermined the use of reliable, tried and tested child protection systems and overturned practise built steadily on enquiry recommendations since the 70s.
He should be praising those authorities that have gone against the tide and kept a secret child protection register or retained specialist child protection social work teams to prioritise investigation of abuse conducted jointly with the police.
• Liz Davies is senior lecturer in children and families social work at London Metropolitan University
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:34 pm
We used to get drunk on Tia Maria and Malibu round at my friend’s house (because her parents had a huge drinks cabinet - and every Christmas more stuff would get shoved to the back and forgotten about) when we were 8.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Chenier
That’s why their sex education works (clear information with a set of boundaries) and ours doesn’t (mixed messages on top of emotional chaos).
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I was such a slow starter. My friends dad gave us gin and tonics when we were 17 and we both got drunk for the first time. My mother was all for calling the police and having him arrested!
But it was quite a long time ago!
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Bring back school beer!
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:22 pm
And in Holland getting pregnant as a teenager is also shameful, which is why it happens far less there than here.
I may be detecting a pattern…
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:14 pm
My sister lives in Italy and she gives her kids (8 & 4) watered down wine sometimes with their meals. But they have a sensible attitude to alcohol over there (drunkenness is shameful) - Brits normally binge.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Is it 12, C&C?
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:07 pm
well, I was stunned to discover that it is age 5.
Under 5 it’s illegal…… five onwards? get in there! I assumed it was something like 12 though I don’t know why I assumed that.
I can’t believe it…. there is discussion going on right now about raising it but it doesn’t say what to.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I didn’t know there was a minimum age.
I didn’t drink alcohol at home at all though - Dad was too busy getting my hamsters drunk. Poor Ephraim used to spend Sundays with his head hanging out the window of his hamster mini-Wendy house, hiccupping, trying to open his wee eyes.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Okay guys ad gals. Off the top of your heads, without looking it up, what is the minimum age that children in Britain are allowed to consume alcohol in the home?
(on here because I didn’t know where else to put it!)
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:59 am
Confiscated, Petronius. You might decide that politicians need a bit of a prodding, and that would never do…
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:57 am
Witch hunts always were more entertaining. Then again there was not much entertainment back then. So what’s the excuse for them now, then? Where’s my torch and pitchfork?