Anne Longfield, the Chair of the Commission for Young Lives, has said that “very vulnerable children have continued to slip from view”, with the pandemic restrictions leading to vulnerable and abused children being isolated from support networks. Drawing on the case of six year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, who was abused and murdered by his step-mother, Longfield mentioned that the young boy was not present in school during the months before his death due to ongoing lockdown restrictions. The Guardian has the story.
The neglect and murder of six year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes was possible because vulnerable children “slipped from view” during the pandemic, the former Children’s Commissioner for England has said.
Anne Longfield told the BBC she was “just heartbroken and totally sickened” by the case, in which Arthur was subjected to a what prosecutors called a “campaign of appalling cruelty” and murdered two months after social workers found no evidence of safeguarding concerns.
A court heard that Arthur was violently shaken and suffered an “unsurvivable brain injury” when his head was banged against a wall by his stepmother, Emma Tustin. After his death in June 2020, he was found to have 130 injuries.
Tustin was found guilty of murder and 29 year-old Thomas Hughes was found guilty of manslaughter on Thursday. They were due to be sentenced at Coventry crown court on Friday.
Longfield, now Chair of the Commission on Young Lives, said the case suggested a failure to put in place lessons from past failures such as the death of Victoria Climbie. “Very vulnerable children have continued to slip from view, and for anyone who looks at the serious case reviews, or hears about them that come after a child’s death, you will see the same things coming up,” she said.
“Time and time again, missed opportunities, lack of coordination, lack of data sharing, the things that professionals need to have at hand to be able to protect these children, still aren’t in place. But whilst there is learning from the serious case reviews, it’s not enough to change what happens to protect these children.”
She said Arthur was particularly vulnerable because of the Covid lockdown in place in the months leading up to his death. Noting that a high caseload and inexperienced staff could also be factors, she said: “What of course was also the case here was that it was a pandemic.
“So a lot of the services went on to the screens for children, and this child in particular, Arthur, wasn’t in school. And it’s much easier for families who want to evade view to do that when they haven’t got someone in the room. So there’s a big lesson there, instantly about if there is a crisis, there are children who are going to slip from view and we have to make sure they have the protection which does need face to face contact.”
She said the best way to keep children like Arthur safe was to intervene early when warning signs were visible to social workers. But she said that cuts to funding made that harder to do. “Long-term help is what needed, and again that’s something that’s been there less and less over recent years, and that means that more children are falling into crisis,” she said.
Worth reading in full.
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I think you have illustrated perfectly why people in their droves are turning away from the mainstream media.
It’s largely one-sided fear porn and takes no account of empirically derived fact, feels no obligation to justify itself, all the while accusing those it disagrees with of doing exactly the same thing.
Yep you can bet on that.
Unless, of course, that industry, organisation or company is, in some way, aligned with state ‘truth’ – then there is no cynicism to be found anywhere.
^This.
It would be interesting to test this assertion and see how many MPs do actually receive funding from the gambling industry (not just winning a couple of quid on the horses).
While we’re at it we could also assess how many MPs receive funding from ‘Green’ lobby groups.
I would wager a couple of quid that our MPs are more in the pocket of the greenies.
A tenner says you’re right on that one.
I just noticed the subtitle “Leading Britain’s Conversation”. Bit pretentious, what? Especially in the Era of X. I was thinking it stood for Left-wing Bollocks Cluster.
More than pretentious.
Clearly not a news organisation then.
”Safeguarding”
There is a repulsive, extremely modern word, the epitome of the nanny state. Overbearing and sanctimonious.
It puts everyone into 3 categories. Victim, predator and protector.
If you don’t play along and give into everything the protectors demand, then you are a bad, reckless person and basically on the side of the predators.
Not too far off topic: RIS = reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
Spying on you and you haven’t even got a mobile phone! This shit sees through walls,no kidding!
Got a router? Tick, your on!
Microwave surveillance
Radio 1 Piedophile DJ dies after falling into river!
Oh dear, how sad, never mind!
His love of pies probably contributed his death, weighed him down perhaps.
Fat floats on water.
I am always amazed when I see talk shows on different screens in the gym at how many influencers and opinion types there are. Add the bias suggested here and it would be a surprise if it were not more abused!
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the gov’t announced the nhs GPs would now be looking at all the adverse events and deaths post covid vaxx? And perhaps offer help.
Maybe asking about the huge level of excess deaths from 2020 onwards when normal pandemic observation would say that there should be less deaths than expected as the weakest have been culled early. This pattern is seen in countries with jab levels of no more than 30% and I presume no ongoing stabby programme. That in the US a report can look at the huge increase in 25-45 deaths – you know, the prime of life – and not go near ischaemic causes is amazing.
In my experience, and I have had a lot of interaction with journalists over the years, there are a slack handful of journalists who are focused on reporting the facts and then discussing that information in a balanced manner, warts n’all. The remainder tend to the lazy and venal, frequently driven by ulterior motives and an all consuming agenda. Anyone who disagrees with their position is an enemy who must be undermined and shut down with urgency.Their ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ trump everything else. Rationality is the prime casualty. Debate is DOA. Journalism contains an awful lot of cess – time we emptied the pit.
From the NICE guidelines:
Consider asking people about gambling (even if they have no obvious risk factors for gambling-related harm) when asking them about smoking, alcohol consumption or use of other substances (for example, as part of a holistic assessment or health check, when registering for a service such as with a GP or in contacts with social services).
The moment it’s accepted that, instead of treating demonstrably existing health problems in ways proven to be clinically effective, the job of a health service is to induce behaviour change to prevent health problems based on empirically unexplained statistical correlations, the number of such behaviours will be keep growing because there’s no amount of behaviours in other people natural busybodies wouldn’t object to and no limit to statistical correlations which can be fabricated intentionally or occur by accident to enable someone to ‘prove’ that his pre-existing theories had been right all the time.
The prominent example for this is Jeremy Clarkson. He was hospitalized because of pneumonia during a holiday in Spain about two years ago. During this stay in hospital, he was (most likely) talked into giving up smoking to improve his health. It improved so much that his life had to be rescued by an emergency ateriosclerosis operation about a year later. A scientist would now conclude that the theory that smoking causes ateriosclerosis has been disproven. A lobbyist who doesn’t give a f***k about how many people end up dying spuriously¹ because of medical misinformation spread for political purpose will start to talk and wave his hands energetically.
¹ An otherwise healthy acquaintance of my mother suddenly dropped dead during a walk about two weaks ago. I can’t help wondering if his life could also have been saved by such an operation had his doctors bothered to look for early symptoms despite he wasn’t a smoker and/or if he had been a celebrity, too.
i was given some good advice over 30 years ago. “If you torture data long enough it will confess to anything”. We have to be very careful with data – it’s just snapshots of reality.