By Rahika and Lili
There have been many reports of child abuse in the past year that have been in the headlines and caught people’s attention. Names like “Baby P” have sadly become recognisable by all. The image of a blonde, blue-eyed little boy looking up at the camera in a little blue jumper is one that was plastered over the newspapers for many weeks. It is hard for us to imagine someone hurting a baby like that, and even harder to imagine how a society could let it happen. Many people blame the social services and say that they are at fault for not stepping in earlier. But what did they try to do help and could they have done more?
Peter Connelly, better known as Baby P, was brutally abused by his mum and her boyfriend. In the period of eight months, he received 60 separate injuries, including a broken back and ribs. He had been noticed by the child protection agency at Haringey but the abuse still continued. In August 2007, Baby P was found dead in his cot.
Khyra Ishaq is another example of child abuse that resulted to death. Khyra, 7, lived with her parents and 5 siblings in Birmingham. Around two months before her death, she was rarely seen and stayed in her house with steel shutter windows and overgrown garden. She had been starved and beaten to death by her own parents. She was punished for attempting to eat anything by cold baths and being made to overeat until she ultimately threw up.
In a different case, a father, of two daughters and a son, abused his children in many different ways. The girls were the focus of this abuse for 35 years; despite the pleas they had sent to the authorities to help them. In this time he fathered nine of his own grandchildren, and his daughters had eighteen pregnancies between them.
The involvement of the Social Services in all of these was surprisingly little or sometimes even none. Baby P was noticed by his local child protection because there were reports of his abuse, however nothing was done. The protection said it was because they had no evidence, so they couldn’t intervene. However when the social services received concerns for the girls being abused by their father, they seemed to ignore the reports; they stepped in after this problem had been going on for 35 years. Once they took action he was given a life sentence in prison. The saddest story of all, the story of Khyra, had an even sadder ending. She died before the services stepped in, they took her siblings away from their mother, but this did not bring back Khyra. Should they have stepped in earlier? 2/3’s of abusive behavior is stopped by the social services, but that still leaves 1/3 of cases that goes by unnoticed.
The Social Services is an important area of our community. Without these services we would have more case like “Baby P”. It is important that as a society we realise that the Social Services have plenty of cases to deal with and many of the social workers are over stretched. Obviously the cases mentioned earlier in this article were horrendous, but rather than looking for people to blame, perhaps it would be more helpful to see how these terrible atrocities could be prevented.
If a child you know of is being abused or bullied, or maybe you yourself are being abused, then it is important to realise that you are not to blame for the violence or the threats and you do not deserve to be abused. There are services such as Childline which allows the person to ring and talk about their problems in confidence. Childline has connections with the social services and will give plenty of great advice to help you deal with your problems.