Can only hope word gets around in prison about what those sicko's did to that poor baby!!!
Baby P...
This has had me in tears several times today and I'm very much looking forward to finishing work and playing with my kids!
[Edited on 13/11/08 by nick205]
Eh??
linky
Can only hope word gets around in prison about what those sicko's did to that poor baby!!!
It would be good if the government and the media would remember just who it was that did that evil stuff.
To listen to the news you would think if it ws the social services who had killed that baby. I dare say, like the rest of us, that they cold have done
their job a bit better, but they have to work within restrictions of budget, time, rules just lke everybody else
John
Bastards.
i was holding my nephew finley today who is 3 months old, when the article came on the news. i looked at him and thought 'how the hell could someone do that to such an innocent little baby'
quote:
Originally posted by mr henderson
It would be good if the government and the media would remember just who it was that did that evil stuff.
To listen to the news you would think if it ws the social services who had killed that baby. I dare say, like the rest of us, that they cold have done their job a bit better, but they have to work within restrictions of budget, time, rules just lke everybody else
John
quote:
Originally posted by StevieB
quote:
Originally posted by mr henderson
It would be good if the government and the media would remember just who it was that did that evil stuff.
To listen to the news you would think if it ws the social services who had killed that baby. I dare say, like the rest of us, that they cold have done their job a bit better, but they have to work within restrictions of budget, time, rules just lke everybody else
John
Wrong! This is a systematic, widespread failure by those whose role it is to act for the baby who so desperately needed their protection.
The evil bastards who did this will pay their price, but those who failed to act properly should also be punished.
You can't say that the system could have 'done their job a bit better' when you're talking about a baby with horrendous injuries over 60 visits. That's nearly a visit per week of the baby's life and still no-one acted - social workers, doctors, nurses - all failed to do their job 'a bit better'.
quote:
Originally posted by StevieB
quote:
Originally posted by mr henderson
It would be good if the government and the media would remember just who it was that did that evil stuff.
To listen to the news you would think if it ws the social services who had killed that baby. I dare say, like the rest of us, that they cold have done their job a bit better, but they have to work within restrictions of budget, time, rules just lke everybody else
John
Wrong! This is a systematic, widespread failure by those whose role it is to act for the baby who so desperately needed their protection.
The evil bastards who did this will pay their price, but those who failed to act properly should also be punished.
You can't say that the system could have 'done their job a bit better' when you're talking about a baby with horrendous injuries over 60 visits. That's nearly a visit per week of the baby's life and still no-one acted - social workers, doctors, nurses - all failed to do their job 'a bit better'.
quote:
Why would one expect child protection, which is inherently complex and difficult,
to work properly in a country that cannot even organise its rubbish collections with reasonable expedition?
quote:
Originally posted by Rod Ends
We can't be surprised by the death of Baby P
It did occur to me that instead of lamenting so much on the news about who is to blame, we could be drawing straws to see who gets to kick the teeth out of the perpetrators. They should definately qualify for capital punishment.
Perhaps if the recession gets really bad they will bring back hanging, got to be a lot cheaper than keeping these disgusting people in jail for a few
years and then letting them out again.
Punishment should really be based on economics rather than social conscience, especially when times are hard.
John
Well, I'm not in that line of work so can't be absolutely certain that any one person is to blame. And if it isn;t any one person, then the
system is at fault, not the individuals working in it.
I think it would be good if we could hear from someone who does work in it, and find out if what I have heard about the restrictions that they
work under, budget, time, legal, are true or not
John
quote:
Originally posted by StevieB
- none of them take the view that this is anything less than a major failure to act on so many levels.
The timesonlie article raises some interesting questions, but I feel that it maybe serves to seek an excuse for the failings by saying that the civil
servants who failed may have feared assault etc.
I have a fairly straight forward view (as a former soldier) that you take the money, you do your duty. If there is a problem, you find a way around
it - in this case, police support should have been called in. In this case, the police should have been called in to support and enforced extraction
of the child to safety.
It really boils my pi$$ to think someone could have put their own personal safety, which they are far more capable of defending themselves and calling
for help, over above the life of a 17 month old child.
My son is 17 months old next week - it makes me fee physically sick to look at him, then read the reports, then realise Baby P was the same age as my
sone is now.
Terrible case.
My wife and I had lengthy dealings with social workers before we fianally adopted. It was, in general, very difficult. Virtually everyone was part
time, with no attempt to cover each other. Paperwork was routinely lost. There semed little concept of getting-a-move on. 'Rules' were
dropped the moment they were inconvenient to the social workers. It was a very frustrating time that really left us with very bad feelings about the
way we were all treated.
I realise there must be good social workers out there - I never met them.
A cynical person might add that it has become a system that employs huge numbers of people, makes largely subjective decisions and has virtually no
accountability.
Sorry to all the good social workers about sounding so mean hearted but what should have felt like a very special time in our lives was made truely
awful.
Martin
quote:
Originally posted by omega0684
i was holding my nephew finley today who is 3 months old, when the article came on the news. i looked at him and thought 'how the hell could someone do that to such an innocent little baby'
quote:
Originally posted by Peteff
I mourn for the child who had such a short unhappy life but the people who need punishing are not the ones who tried to help and failed.
As someone who used to deal with a lot of overlapping issues with various SW Dept's, I can only say that (in my experience) they are an absolute
shambles.
Severe lack of communication, continuity, common sense and above all else... the balls to do the right thing.
I need to stress that there are (of course) plenty of good SW's out there - they do their bit but are constantly ground down by the
'system' to the point of apathy.
quote:
Originally posted by Peteff
People like that only see the child as a way to extract money from the system which is geared to keeping children with their parents.
it will be a long time before the details all come out at the moment everyone is basing things on part of the story. The facts we know are the people
who comitted the acts that killed the child are in custody, but the exact reasons why the services did not stop it are not clear. You can bet there
will be a lot of buck passing going on. I have worked in cases involving this sort of thing ( though not as bad thank god) but 9 times out of 10
they will say wherever possible they dont want to take children away from parents!!! I have heard this so many times before its absolute bollocks!!
What the real issues are is that it costs shed loads of money to take the child into care and have it fostered!! It does nt cost as much as the bill
for the monthly mileage claim a friend of mine puts in each month (and she is a freelance social worker and charges £35.00 per hour plus expenses)
She herself states that they all have massive case loads, far more than they are supposed to have to be efficient and deal with the cases properly. It
is very much a cases of too many chiefs and not enough indians. There will be loads of senior managers , middle managers , lower mangers and hardly
any bugger on the ground! I m not jumping to ss defence I just know from my line of work and over 20 yrs of seeing ss talk a good job but deliver
£$%& all. There I have said my bit R.I.P
Kev 
For the past 30 years, the overriding rule in social care has been that taking a child away from its parents is the very, very last resort. As a
result, we have the lowest frequency of children being taken into care in the whole of Europe. Unfortunately, this result far to often in parents
being given the benefit of the doubt. Combine this with manipulative parents and well-meaning social workers and you have a recipe for disaster.
Social work is poorly paid and low status. It therefore attracts selfless and idealistic individuals when really what's needed for the job is
cynical, suspicious bastards.
Nick
quote:
Originally posted by mr henderson
I agree, it's too easy for people who weren't there to blame the ones who were. Let's all remember that the people who killed that kid were not the social workers but the people who are now in prison
John
quote:
Originally posted by MikeRJe]
The animals (how can they even be classed as human?) that did this should be hanging from a rope.
It sickens me to the core when i hear about this case. Im deeply shocked.
Whilst it may be true the SS etc have a duty of care to protect the vulnerable people they act for it cant be easy for them. If they automatically
thought the worst on every case then they would soon get bad press for taking kids away from families that just need a bit of educating to correct
their ways. Lets just hope that lessons are learnt and systems are improved.
What also amazes me is how organisations like RSPCA can take people to court and prevent them from owning animals but very little seems to be possible
in terms of stopping some people from having children.
Words fail me in this case and i hope indirect justice is served when the sicko's get sentenced (ie from behind the bars).
I've been giving this some considerable thought, and have read the opinions of others both here and elsewhere, and I have come to the conclusion
that the death of this child, whilst horrifying and very sad, was basically inevitable.
Why do I say that? Well, it's to do with the way society works. Each family unit tends to be isolated from its surroundings, people are no longer
in and out of eachother's houses all day, and things go on behind closed doors that nobody else knows about. The only way children like Baby P
can be protected is if we pay someone else to go into these houses, once they are identified, and check that the children are OK. And therein lies the
problem, we are paying other people to do this work. And anybody who has ever employed somebody else to do work of any kind will know that that work
is never done 100% right 100% of the time. The best we can hope for is almost always Ok almost all of the time. As soon as anything less than absolute
perfection is permitted, then there will be cases such as Baby P's. The only question is, how often?
The best we can hope for is for cases like these to be extremely rare. How rare is that? Good question.
What it all boils down to is how much money do we want to spend? How much of your wages (if you are lucky enough to still be receiving any) are you
happy to allow to go in tax to pay for a much larger, better trained, better equipped, better motivated and better supported social services?
Easy for any of us to say, well, howabout an extra couple of pence on the income tax rate? How much better social service would that pay for? And the
answer is, quite a bit better, but would it be good enough to prevent another death like this from ever happening ever again? No, as with all things
human perfection simply isn't available. The law of diminishing returns applies, and more money spent will reduce the number of innocents who are
slaughtered but not prevent it.
I reckon the real argument here is how much do we want to spend on social services? then we need to consider the police, ambulance services, other
emergency services, all the other things that civilised society needs to pay for, and then work out if we have any money left to pay for anything
else, such as food, or maybe education.
In conclusion, I believe that the people who killed that child are in prison, if we want to blame anybody else then I think we need to have a think
about the way our society works first, and consider whether we should be throwing the first stones.
All the above IMHO
John
i like yourviews John. As with all 'problems' they can never be solved effectively without understanding the root cause.
Solving an engineering type problem in this way is relatively simple, however when i did some 6 sigma training a while back i was jokingly advised by
the trainer that topics such as world hunger should be avoided until you are experienced. I guess Social Services comes under this heading!
So - how much do we want to spend on SS - i guess the true answer is nothing. As you say it would be nice if we knew each other well enough to know
what is right and wrong and be able to spot issues ourselves. However i guess there has been serial killers, mental health problems, etc etc for as
long as there has been humans on the Earth so perhaps its a sad quirk of life that there are dubious characters out there intent in causing problems.
Luckily such events are rare.
How much do we need to spend - no-one can ever answer this. For the same reason that fraud experts are always one step behind the criminals, there
will always be people who get away with something, as sad as it might be.
In the case of Baby P - all i can hope is that the widespread publicity at least prevents a repeat in the short term and that the parents etc get what
they deserve and that is also publicised as a warning to others. Iam against vigilantes but there is a fine line and exception to be made in this case
where the baby could not defend itself.
I still feel sick at the thought (allegedly)that the baby had a broken back for a period of time - that is purely barbaric.
I would agree with the opinion that there will always be an exceptional cse that slips through the net. I don't think that is the core of this
debate.
I think the issues lie with the amount of times the flag was raised on a baby under a chld protection order and none of the signs were either spotted
or acted upon. I think that is the debate here, and whether those who should, in the reasonable expert opinion (and that;s the important bit) of the
invetigators, have been able to put the evidence together and take decisive action to the benefit of the child, and if so what level of accountability
should the be held for.
If you are the responsible engineer for, say, a railway project and it goes wrong, you can be held for corporate manslaughter. Most SS cases would be
far garder to make a judgement on, but the case of Baby P, in my opinion form what we can read, will more than likely show a catastrophic failure of
the system. Lets not forget that it's not all that long since the same SS dept failed peviously.
The failures in this case are likely to be at a more senior level, where decisions on courses of action are made, rather than with the 'on the
ground' SW's.
In my opinion, a level of accountability and subsequent punishment (criminal rather than just suspension or sacking) i what is needed to ensure that
people, at all levels, are focused on performance and reults.
That is the best way to ensure (IMHO) that, of the few extreme cases that slip through the net (and there will be some) were unforseeable and
unavoidable (such as the recent case in Manchester, where the correct actions were taken by officials, but they simply couln;t get there in time).
What pisses me off most is that none of them have been convicted of murder because they "can't prove who delivered the fatal blow".
Surely it's time for a major review of our laws! I understand that the scandinavian countries have added a 'law of common sense' which
allows the court to proceed beyond technicalities and sentence accordingly.
quote:
Originally posted by scootz
What pisses me off most is that none of them have been convicted of murder because they "can't prove who delivered the fatal blow".
Surely it's time for a major review of our laws! I understand that the scandinavian countries have added a 'law of common sense' which allows the court to proceed beyond technicalities and sentence accordingly.
They've already been prosecuted Stevie (for murder), but only found guilty of "causing or allowing the death of a child or vulnerable
person" because they couldn't prove who dealt the fatal blows.
This means they can't get the full weight that a murder conviction carries.
Then thats whole big crock of poo then!
Seconded!