The Abuses Faced by Children in the United Kingdom - Essay Example

To Suffer Thy Children: A Review of the United Kingdom’s Child Protection Policy The story of Victoria Climbie may simply be seen as the story of two cruel adults, one innocent child, and a breach of trust of savage, unimaginable proportions. Entrusted by her parents in the Ivory Coast to her great aunt Marie Therese Kouao so that she could be given a better life in the United Kingdom, little Victoria instead found herself in the hands of sadists --- Kouao and her boyfriend Carl Manning. When she died on 25 February 2000, she had 128 separate injuries on her body, cigarette burns, scars where she had been hit by a bike chain and hammer blows to her toes. The investigation also disclosed that she was forced to sleep in the bin liner in the bath. And yet, it is also the story of institutions that have failed our children, a bureaucracy that has neglected the most vulnerable members of our society, and individual officials whose individual omissions have resulted in collective negligence. In the hearings subsequent to the death of Victoria Climbie, it was discovered that she was seen by dozens of social workers, medical practitioners and police officers but all of them failed to either detect signs of abuse or failed to act on them until it was too late. The inquiry revealed that there were as many as 12 opportunities were the authorities could have intervened, but failed to. For example, when Dr. Mary Schwartz, a pediatrician, looked at Climbie’s cuts wounds, she dismissed it as scabies and sent her back home to her abusers. Police officer Karen Jones refused to inspect the home of the Kouao and Manning, where Climbie lived, because she was afraid she would catch scabies from the furniture. Bickering and backstabbing the child protection service in the Haringey area had also contributed to the failure to provide immediate and adequate response to the abuse. Despite a major tell-tale sign, i.e., Victoria was not enrolled in school, which is one of the indicators that an abuse could be taking place, social workers took the word of Manning and Kouao at face value and did not probe any further. Though Victoria’s abusers were eventually sent to jail and sentenced to life imprisonment, the hard questions still remain. How could this kind of abuse – so horrible and grotesque – to a child of tender years have gone undetected? Is the system so decrepit, so shot full of holes that despite many warning signs and many opportunities to save Victoria’s life, she still ended up battered and dead, with 128 injuries on her frail body? And perhaps the most troubling question of all: could this happen again? Dare we allow this to happen again? In response to the widespread shock and indignation resulting from the completely avoidable death of the eight-year-old child, an inquiry was conducted, headed by Lord Laming, who called the Victoria Climbie affair “the worse case of neglect (he) has ever heard of.” Notably, Laming found that the legislative framework was intrinsically sound,, the problem was mainly one of implementation. Health secretary Alan Milburn said, “"Victoria's death was a tragedy. It is vital that all agencies dealing with children learn the lesson from this terrible case.” The Laming report came up with several recommendations, including the following (Batty, 2003): · The creation of a children and families board chaired by a senior government minister to coordinate policies and initiatives that have a bearing on the wellbeing of children and families. · A national agency for children and families, led by a children’s commissioner, should be established to ensure local services meet national standards for child protection and implement reforms. · Committees for children and families should be established by councils, with members drawn from social services, education, housing, the NHS and the police. · New local management boards – chaired by council chief executives with members from the police, health, social services, education, housing and the probation service – should be set up. The boards would appoint a local director of children and family services to monitor effective interagency working on child welfare and protection. · The creation of a national children’s database that keeps a record of every contact a child has with a member of staff from the police, health and local authorities. The abuses faced by children in the United Kingdom While a tragedy in itself – certainly a devastating one for the parents of the little girl who only wanted to give her a shot at a better life away from poverty-stricken Ivory Coast – the greater tragedy would be to fail to see that the Victoria Climbie affair is but a symptom of a bigger social problem: the abuse of many children in the United Kingdom falling within the cracks of policy and governance. Indeed, child abuse is an issue of grave importance, and maltreatment, something more complex than we think (Gough, 1996). It has long been established that children’s rights are human rights and that it is the duty of every state to act in the best interests of the child and to provide a safe environment conducive to his development. Said O’Neill (1998, p. 445): We may begin with a reminder of the appeal and importance of thinking in terms of children’s rights. Children easily become victims. If they had rights, redress would be possible. Rather than being powerless in the face of neglect, abuse, molestation, and mere ignorance they (like other oppressed groups) would have legitimate and (in principle) enforceable claims against others. Although they (unlike many other oppressed groups) cannot claim their rights for themselves, this is no reason for denying them rights. Rather, it is a reason for setting up institutions that can monitor those who have children in their charge and intervene to enforce rights. The Aristotelian thought that justice is a relation between equals, so inappropriate in dealing with children, must be rejected. The lives of children are no private matter, but a public concern that can be met by fostering children’s rights. Parental violence to a children is one of the more popular forms of child abuse. In a study, it was discovered that children from lower income brackets or social classes suffered a greater likelihood of becoming victims of parental abuse. (Cawson, et al. 2000). Perhaps a poor educational background and lack of exposure to new ideas contribute to the parents’ insistence on outdated forms of discipline, like corporal punishment. More insidiously, it can also be theorized that parents who experience marginalization and disempowerment from their community or social network take it out on their children to derive whatever little sense of power and authority that they can. Hence, one particular field where discrimination should be especially guarded against is the field of social work, wherein social workers are there precisely to assist those individuals who are, in some way, marginalized and in need of assistance due to a particular infirmity (Barr, 2004). Often already disempowered and vulnerable as they are, they are most susceptible to discrimination by the society they find themselves in (Alcock, 2003). Hence, social workers must take extra care in ensuring that discrimination does not permeate their practice and that they are equipped with the necessary tools to combat discrimination, whenever and wherever it exists within their realm of accountability. In the same study, it was discovered that most of the violent treatment took place at home, with mothers more likely inflicting the punishment. More than one fifth of the respondents reported regular physical battery, and there is a greater incidence in female children than in male children. (Cawson, et. al. 2000). The troubling conclusion of this, of course, is that most of the violence perpetrated against children is committed in the context of the family and the home. To quote: The survey results have identified the extent to which violence towards children is primarily a family affair. The only arena outside the family where it occurs with any frequency is between age peers at school or in other settings where the young congregate. Violence by unrelated adults, including professionals, is rare. Within the family, it is primarily birth parents who mete out the violent treatment, though sibling violence and step-parent violence also occur. Another issue is neglect, which essentially means the absence of adult supervision required to provide children with basic needs, such as food, shelter, clothing and even education. In a sense, it is more difficult to quantify neglect for unlike physical violence which can manifest itself immediately in the presence of wounds and bruises and cuts, as in the case of Victoria, there can be cases of neglect with no immediate visible signs. Neglect is not as easily quantifiable as abuse, although the effects of neglect are equally long lasting – physically, psychologically and emotionally. Burgess and Conger (1978, p. 1163) expounded further on the difference between neglect and abuse: Child abuse refers to nonaccidental physical and psychological injury to a child under the age of eighteen as a result of acts perpetrated by a parent or caretaker. Neglect refers to the harming of a child either through lack of care or supervision. In both cases there are considerable conceptual problems largely due to the fact that we are dealing with behavior that falls along a continuum of caregiver-child relationships. Another realm altogether is child sexual abuse. It is of great interest to note that in child sexual abuse cases, economic status plays a minimal role. The children who are considered in a high-risk situation are children who are experiencing parental inadequacy and emotional deprivation. (Finkelhor, 1994). The tragedy is that child victims of sexual abuse tend to suffer in the long-term, even as adults. (Briere & Elliot, 1994). They have a higher tendency of getting pregnant as adolescents, of drug use and of child abuse to their own children (Boyer & Fine, 1992). Truly the scars left by child sexual abuse are deep. When one is raped or molested, it goes beyond the realm of the physical and constitutes a vicious attack on one’s psyche and self-perception. Hence, given these dire consequences of child abuse and its huge tendency to destroy the life of the victim, it should be primary concern of the state to intervene and to have mechanisms and facilities in place to prevent abuse from taking place or to protect a child who is in the hands of an abuser or a neglectful caregiver. It must be a concerted effort to ensure that children are given the proper environment optimal for their development. Child Protection Services 1889 was the first time that the United Kingdom acknowledged the necessity of intervention in cases of child abuse between parent and child. In a sense, it recognized the autonomy of the person of the child, and thus refuting the idea that the child is merely a property of his parents. The creation of the Children’s Charter expanded and added additional layers of protection for children and avenues for address. In 1974, following the death of Maria Cowell, there was a realization that the lack of coordination between child protection services imperiled the child. Hence Area Child Protection Committees (ACPC) were created for the purpose of ensuring greater coordination. In 1989, the Children Act came into force. One of its aims was to provide “a consistent framework for regulating all forms of substitute care” (Masson, 1992). In 1991, the “Working Together Under the Children Act” was passed, which granted investigatory powers to the ACPC to look into cases of child abuse. It would seem however that agencies only scramble to get their act together after another child has died at the hands of her abusers. Says Dingwall (1986): One of the conventional responses of the British state to the revelation of a major disaster, accident or scandal is to set up an inquiry under the leadership of a lawyer. A Child in Trust, the Report of the Panel of Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Jasmine Beckford, under the chairmanship of Louis Blom-Cooper, Q.C. is a recent and well-publicized example. Xxx Blom-Cooper’s report stands in an honorable tradition of investigations into apparent failures in the state’s care and protection of children. The historic inquiry by Sir Walter Monckton, K.C. into the death of Denis O’Neill in 1945 contributed significantly to the demand for reform which resulted in the Children Act 1948. More recently, the report in 1974 on the death of Maria Colwell, from a panel led by T.G. Field-Fisher, Q.C. played a part in launching the present, continuing wave of concern about child care. Between 1973 and 1981, a DHSS review identified 18 other inquiries, of which 12 appear to have been chaired by lawyers. It is of little surprise therefore, that the death of Victoria has sparked a nationwide outrage that resulted in the Laming Inquiry, which in turn led to the creation of the 2003 Green Paper entitled “Every Child Matters”, which provides a wide range of measures for child welfare and protection. In order to address the bureaucratic defects that gave rise to the Victoria Climbie tragedy, the Paper provides for greater information sharing between responsible agencies with contact details of the professionals, and gives each child a unique identity number to better trace their whereabouts and conditions. Criticized by many for its deficiencies, for example the absence of a gender analysis (Daniel, et. al., 2005) and the failure to acknowledge the tensions between “entitlement and responsibility, protection and punishment, and in the scope of education” (Williams, 2004). By and large, however, it cannot be gainsaid that the real and lasting solution is a change in mindset to accompany changes in policy. It is difficult to forget that the reason one police officer refused to enter the house of Victoria and her abusers was because she was afraid to catch rabies. The social worker and the other officials responsible for child protection must be cognizant of the milieu in which he operates and keenly aware of the vulnerabilities of the individual he is tasked to protect. The sense of disenfranchisement, the lack of access to institutions and state infrastructure, the lack of redress mechanism, the lack of participation in policy-making (Drake, 2001) – these are more present in children than in adults. At the end of the day, we must be united in our goal to provide a better world for our children, where they can grow to the fullest of their potential and contribute to society as productive and well-rounded citizens. References Alcock, P. Social Policy in Britain. London: MacMillan. 2003. Barr N. The Politics of a Welfare State. Oxford University Press. 2004. Boyer, D. & David, F. “Sexual Abuse as a Factor in Adolescent Pregnancy and Child Maltreatment”. Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 1992), pp. 4-11+19 Briere, J. & Elliot, D. “Immediate and Long-Term Impacts of Child Sexual Abuse” The Future of Children, Vol. 4, No. 2, Sexual Abuse of Children (Summer - Autumn, 1994), pp. 54-69 Burgess, R. & Conger, R. “Family Interaction in Abusive, Neglectful, and Normal Families”. Child Development, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Dec., 1978), pp. 1163-1173 Daniel, B., Featherstone, B., Hooper, C.A. & Scourfield, J. “Why Gender Matters for Every Child Matters.” British Journal of Social Work 2005 35(8):1343-1355. Dingwall, R. “The Jasmine Beckford Affair” The Modern Law Review, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Jul., 1986), pp. 489-507 Finkelhor, D. “Current Information on the Scope and Nature of Child Sexual Abuse” The Future of Children, Vol. 4, No. 2, Sexual Abuse of Children (Summer - Autumn, 1994), pp. 31-53 Gough, D. “Defining the Problem” Child Abuse and Neglect. Vol. 20 No. 11. (1996) 993-1102. Masson, J. “Implementing Change for Children: Action at the Centre and Local Reaction” Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 320-338 O’Neill, “O. Children's Rights and Children's Lives”. Ethics, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Apr., 1988), pp. 445-463 Williams, Fiona. “What Matters is who Works: Why Every Child Matters to New Labour. Commentary on the DfES Green Paper Every Child Matters.” Critical Social Policy, Vol. 24, No. 3, 406-427 (2004) Read More