Children in care are still vulnerable to widespread abuse, when is the law going to protect them?

[Alison J Stevens]

Children in care are still vulnerable to widespread abuse, when is the law going to protect them?

PUBLISHED: 15:45, 11 May 2012 | UPDATED: 15:45, 11 May 11TH,

This week we have heard one sorry tale after another concerning the abuse of children in the British care system. Heart-wrenching stories of young people, almost exclusively girls, who have been left vulnerable and exposed to the worst excesses of human nature.

Oh, how horrified we have been to hear about these teenagers, groomed for sex by gangs of men who have demonstrated unconscionable and barely-human ways of behaving towards their young charges.

Immoral adults who think nothing of exploiting these children and leaving them for dead, if not physically then mentally and emotionally. Destined to enter adulthood as hollow shells of their former selves whose lives resemble those laid out by 17th century philosopher, Hobbes, as 'nasty, brutish and short'.

 

Failing: If the State is given the vital job of being a surrogate parent to our children then it better be sure to get it right

So, yes, we have done the customary thing of throwing our hands up in the air. We have tut-tutted about issues of PC-dogma in penetrating these gangs - due to issues of race and religion according to popular misconception - and we have questioned over and over again what has happened to our society to allow such abuse to take place with some of our most vulnerable young people?

And, yet, we all know that once the media storm dies down, the situation is likely to return to normal leaving another generation of children wide-open to the harms that adults would do them

You have to wonder what is going on. I know I do.

How can it be that young people, who have been swooped up into the British care system - for their protection, apparently - are even more vulnerable than they might have been had they been left in the care of their parents, neglectful or otherwise.

 

   

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Even more troubling is the fact that we have reached record high numbers of children taken into care according to figures released in April this year by the Children and Family Court Advisory Service (Cafcass).

What a terrible equation. We have more children than ever before plunged into a care system - due in part to the public reaction to Baby P - and a framework that appears incapable of looking after them.

The problem, I have discovered, is multi-faceted - as these things often are.

There is the issue of interpretation of law concerning The Children's Act of 2004, and how care homes see fit, and are stymied at times, from implementing it.

There is also a little matter - surprise, surprise - of reduction in funding since the Coalition came to power in 2010. Of course, in the way of a privatisation-mad Conservative Prime Minister, this hasn't affected the profitability of the business of care.

Despite some private care homes charging as much as 250,000 pounds per annum for the care of one child, there has been a significant reduction in financial support for national children's services that would actively assist child protection.

Care homes are mired in confusion, deliberately or otherwise. They are part of a complicated system that appears to reward private industry rather more than the vulnerable individual.

Unquestionably, they have been caught short in lacking the basic tools to do what they are designed to do: protect children.

Let us be clear here, the issue of child abuse regarding children in care is not a new phenomenon. We only have to look at the widescale abuse in Catholic care homes, going back decades, to confirm this. 

Child exploitation, for children in care, is as old as the care system itself.  For where there are children in need - and without loving adults to protect them - we have found opportunistically-vile individuals who would take advantage of that.

 

We have more children than ever before plunged into a care system - due in part to the public reaction to Baby P

There have been a number of cases in recent years where paedophile rings, Satanic rituals, child trafficking and children in care have formed something of an obscene alliance.

In 2009, a secret immigration document revealed that as many as 77 Chinese children had disappeared from a care home in the London Borough of Hillingdon. No sooner had they arrived at the home then they appeared to vanish.

These children, it was discovered, were farmed out across the UK, in an assortment of perverted business deals that resulted in already-vulnerable youngsters being plunged into prostitution and drug-trafficking.

What should have been a national scandal was nothing of the sort. Hillingdon Borough Council waxed lyrical about how the disappearances appeared to be 'planned and coordinated' by criminal gangs. There was no suggestion that the care home at the centre of the scandal was involved.

Action: Tim Loughton, the children's minister, said yesterday he was launching a 'clampdown' on councils sending children huge distances from where they grew up

Meanwhile, Jacqui Smith, the then Home Secretary - and a particularly hopeless one, at that - behaved in her customary ostrich-fashion and failed to secure the perimeters of children in care in the way she should have done. That's one on her conscience, for sure.

So it was that children in care have continued to be 'lost' in the system. And this week's scandals are the result of that.  But there are others.

Take for example, the situation concerning Kent County Council only last year. Then, 25 children, aged between 12 and 17, disappeared from care homes and foster care in the county.

Kent Council admitted that they had 'no way of knowing' what had happened to the children although it was suspected that these young people were also victims of child trafficking across the UK.

The problem for Kent Council, as with other councils when it comes to care homes, is that they are prevented, at times, from physically caring for the children.

Various laws, including those set out in Minimum Care Standards for the UK, actively outline how care homes are restricted from doing their job.

Interpretation, as with all things, has created numerous problems. Where children are given the liberty to freedom in care this has resulted in them coming and going at will.

Children leave care homes and staff are prevented from stopping them. These young people - some of them already involved with grooming gangs - can come and go as if it their care home is a hotel.

How ridiculous. Our children are placed into care for protection and then allowed to leave as and when they desire and into the arms of goodness knows who. Surely that is besides the very point of them being there in the first place?

 

Criticism: MPs have accused private children's homes - which charge councils over £250,000 for each troubled youngster - of letting down vulnerable girls

I am not a supporter of 'parenting by state'. I believe that Governments, worldwide, notoriously seek to usurp the parental role. Cases of psychiatrists tearing children from the arms of loving parents, only to dump them into the arms of national machinery, are legendary and becoming even more so.

Clearly, though, what we have is a national crisis. We are deeming parents unfit to care for their children and we are placing them in a system that all but destroys them completely.

I do not deny that sometimes there is a very real need for children to be taken into the care system so that they stand some chance, despite their inherited odds, of leading a productive life.

 

 

More...

• Scandal of care firms that failed to protect girls from grooming: T...

But, in order to do this, we must insure that there are appropriate measures taken, and immediately, to protect these young people.

We must strengthen the guidelines of their living arrangements, if necessary, so that care really means care.  We must make this Coalition uphold the important 2003 initiative of 'Every Child Matters' - which they are seeking to move away from - and we must make private homes far more accountable than they currently are.

If the State is given the vital job of being a surrogate parent to our children then it better be sure to get it right. Sadly, as it stands, it is spectacularly failing such a monumental responsibility.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2142965/Children-care-vul...