Terri Dowty of ARCH was on Woman's Hour yesterday discussing ContactPoint with Baroness Delyth Morgan, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children, Young People and Families, (from the 2nd minute). I am pretty sure that the Baroness is wrong to think that the child's school will not be recorded on the database, which doesn't do much to make one feel reassured by her protestations that the database will be secure.
Terri's point that the database would have done nothing to protect Victoria Climbie was rather lost by the failure of the interviewer to grasp this central point, so in a tiny attempt to start to put this right...."ContactPoint would not have saved Victoria. " Victoria didn't need a superficial tracking device. She needed experienced workers who were able to make good face to face risk assessments and to take responsibility for their decisions rather than to pass them around the houses to other members of the multi-disciplinary team.
Resources are scarce. The little that is available should be concentrated upon employing experienced workers and upon the children who most need the intervention, not wasted on a vast computer system which will haemorrhage cash and information, make seeking out children in genuine need all the more difficult, (like looking for needles in haystacks), and won't save much time to boot.
Should the link above break, it is worth trying here.
1 comment:
I absolutely detest this idea that society is responsible for every child that exists.
These rare anedoctes are freak cases that are not a portrait of parents in this country and should be ignored.
These people were not even British or European. They were immigrant Africans for Christ's sake. This was a child that her irresponsible parents sent away to be cared for a mad aunt and her abusive partner. If they didn't know this woman well enough, that was their mistake. It was the parents' responsibility.
It's not the social services responsibility to check if other people's children are being well taken care of by their mad aunts.
These anedoctes will stop to happen on their own soon parents improve as people. Society cannot stop it.
Victoria could never have been saved. What the social workers did was to encourage more abuse from uneducated people. They probably noticed the child wasn't well taken care off. The people caring for her were trying to keep appearance at all costs out of fear. That's why her teeth were brushed until her gums bled. That's why such a cruel punishment in order for her to stop bed wetting was used.
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