Tag Archives: baby p

Yet more Serious Case Reviews

Posted on October 11, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

 

Whatever the collective noun for Serious Case Reviews is  (a flurry, a murmuring, an avalanche, a papering, an omphaloskepsis*, a whitewashing?) that’s what we’ve had over the last few weeks.

 

The first I read about this week was from Glasgow, and involved a foster carer who was murdered by a young person placed in her care.  The main lesson was to have been cautious about the very good progress this vulnerable and damaged young person was making in the early days of the placement and to have had proper access and regard to the full chronology of his troubled life.

 

http://www.glasgowchildprotection.org.uk/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=17069&p=0

 

 

The second was Child T, a four year old in Haringey. 

 

http://www.haringeylscb.org/child_t__full_serious_case_review_overview_report-2.pdf

 

Now, if there’s anywhere in the country that is nervous about Serious Case Reviews, it would be Haringey. They were the authority in Victoria Climbie and Baby P, and they really don’t want to have a third tragedy.  They were brave to hold this one, since it didn’t automatically meet the criteria and they could have ducked conducting one.

 

In my opinion, they did the right thing in conducting one – I may as well say up front here, that there are real problems with the way they managed the case prior to that decision. (Whilst I think professionals are often harshly blamed after the event for failing to see into the future, this isn’t one of those. Sometimes a cock-up is just a cock-up, and I won’t defend those.  I have to call this one as I see it, and children were harmed here over many months as a result of professional error)

 

The child did not die, fortunately, though on removal in 2011 was found to have fifty bruises on his body. On my count, there were four episodes of bruising. Alarmingly, the last happened AFTER he was seen with 50 bruises, a few days later, whilst the case was being prepared for Court with a plan of him continuing to live at home.

 

 

(A) On Wednesday 30/6/10, at 10:30 pm, Child T was taken to the Accident & Emergency Department (A&E) at North Middlesex Hospital (NMHUT) by his mother and Mr C. He had bruising around the eyes, forehead and nose. Bruising and swelling was said to have become worse during the day. Mr C said that Child T often ran around the house and ‘bangs and hits himself on the wall’ 

 

Child T was three years old at the time. You may, if you are familiar with Baby P, be having shuddering sensations at the suggestion that the child’s bruises were self-inflicted. We have heard that before.

 

It gets worse than that though, because what follows is something that the professionals never had in Baby P – a direct disclosure

 

(B)On 4/7/10 a Polish speaking doctor, PR1, spoke to various family members who were visiting the hospital. He was told, by Child W, that Mr C had hit her so as to cause bruising to her bottom. PR1 spoke to CP2 who subsequently spoke to the Enfield Emergency Duty Team2 (EDT) as it was now the evening. It was agreed that there were no grounds to keep Child W in hospital that night but that the concerns raised should be followed up the next day. The following day, 5/7/10, before any follow-up action was taken, Child T was removed from hospital by his mother and Mr C, without the agreement of medical staff. Over the previous days Mr C had increasingly expressed his annoyance about the child’s prolonged stay in hospital, because, he said,of the disruptive consequences for family life

 

[Note the involvement of Enfield, rather than Haringey – it seems that the hospital were slightly confused about which local authority were responsible, but after that referral the case got properly passed on to Haringey]

 

 

I have to say, as a child protection lawyer advising local authorities, having missed (A) would be quite bad but not dreadful, but having missed (B) would be dreadful.  Having missed (B) against the backdrop of Baby P is, on the face of it, hard to fathom.

 

There were bruises to a young child, unexplained, the sibling was saying that the mother’s boyfriend hit the children, the boyfriend was being annoyed in hospital and the child was removed without the consent of the doctors. That is pure alarm bell territory.

 

(It doesn’t HAVE to equate to removal, but it is certainly something that ought to have made everyone involved very very concerned and vigilant)

 

A strategy meeting took place – the medical opinion was reported to be inconclusive  and the police who attended weren’t aware of a domestic violence callout between mum and Mr C that same day.

 

[This is what was actually said, and anyone who thinks that this is ‘inconclusive’ is on another bloody planet

 

The medical report considered at the Strategy Meeting had stated that “I am very uncomfortable with the injury on his forehead. I do not accept that a 3 year old child would bang his head with such severity and not cry out. In addition, bruising on the leftside is in a very unusual place and this cannot be incurred either from fallingor from play. I cannot exclude the possibility that some of these may have arisen from pressure from fingers”  ]

 

 

Despite the strat meeting having concluded and the case progressing to relatively low action on the basis of the social worker and police deciding that the medical opinion was “inconclusive”, the Consultant Paediatrician who first saw the child (CP1) wrote a letter containing this

 

(C) “I would like to highlight that this child had an injury to his forehead resulting in a haematoma… that could only have occurred if there were a large amount of force on impact … the second fact that concerns me greatly is the presence of bruising on the left side of the rib cage. This is an unusual place for bruising to be found in a child and implies a second mechanism of injury taking place, once again for which the parents claim to have no knowledge. My concerns here are that this is a 3 year old boy who has had two separate injuries for which there have been no explanations and each injury individually is concerning and in an area which is quite uncommon in a child of this age”

 

 

I’ve defended social workers before, and I will again, and I defended particularly the social workers in Haringey who worked Baby P because I think that they were fundamentally let down by a paediatrician who didn’t give them the medical evidence they would have needed to act and get the case before a Court.  The paediatricians here did their job properly and they simply weren’t listened to.

 

But I am afraid that this is a smoking gun. If that came across my desk, we would be having an amazingly urgent legal planning meeting (i.e, “I’m on my way to you, RIGHT NOW”)  to discuss this child and work out what we would be doing to keep the child and siblings safe.  If the conclusion was to work with the family to keep the child at home, I’m fairly sure we would have been getting the case before the Court to endorse that plan. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with any local authority lawyer whose advice would not have been “this is going before a Court, as soon as possible”

 

 

(D) On 9th August 2010, Mr C presented at his GP with self-inflicted cuts to his arms. The GP did not make any referral to social services.

 

(E) On 30th August 2010, the mother was seen at an obstetrics appointment with bruising on her arms – the notes showed up the suspicions of domestic violence, the obstetrician invited mother to be admitted overnight, mother declined. She was very nervous and keen to leave, and Mr C was very keen to get out of the hospital. No referral was made.

 

 

(F) On 31/8/10 Mr C took Child T to the GP, saying that he was concerned that he child bruised easily. He had bruises to his back and legs. The GP (GP1) arranged blood tests which indicated no medical explanation for the bruising. On 17/9/10 Child T was seen by a nurse (PN1) for immunisations. She noticed bruises on his arms, legs and back and asked a GP (GP2) to see

him. GP2 examined the child and arranged for him to be seen for follow-up on 22/9/10.

 

 

Now, I already thought that (B) and (C) were bad things to miss, but to add (F) into the equation just reinforces this.  Very often with Serious Case Reviews there’s a prediction bias and hindsight bias that means that working back from a known outcome, we tend to see all the footprints leading up to that event as being obvious and inexorable and that ‘of course that’s where this is all going, how could nobody see it’

 

But regardless of that, which is something to always be very cautious about; if you have suspicious bruises to a child, a strong paediatric opinion about those bruises and then another episode of bruising two months later; something needs to be happening.

 

A worker could, potentially, have gripped the case and made a decision that this risk could be safely managed at home; but that needs to be a conscious and deliberate and deliberated decision, not just inactivity resulting in that happening.  It is STAGGERING that the social worker on the ground didn’t ever share the paediatrician’s letter at (C) with his/her manager.

 

(G) On 14th September 2010, Mr C told his GP that he was injecting heroin every day. Three weeks later, he said he was drug-free and needed no further help.

 

(H) When the sibling child Y was born in December 2010, hospital staff noted tension and arguments between the mother and Mr C

(I) On 15th  February 2011, the case was closed by the social worker

 

(J)  Three days later, on 18/2/11 (a Friday) police were called to the family homeby Ms B who made allegations of violent conduct by Mr C to her and to Child T. Police could see that the child was extensively bruised and they arrested Mr C. Child T was left overnight with his mother. There was no recorded consultation with the EDT at that point

 

(K)The following day Child T was taken by police for medical examination and was seen by a paediatric registrar (PR2). The EDT had been made aware of the situation in the morning and both police officers and an EDT officer, EDT1, attended the medical. Child T was found to have more than 50 bruises of varying ages and sizes. He told the doctor of having been hit with a belt and a

stick by Mr C. The doctor judged that many of the injuries were caused by physical abuse and that others were ‘highly suspicious’

 

(L) The doctor spoke to Ms B who described how she had been the subject of repeated physical assaults by Mr C. She also said that she had suspected that Child T was being abused by Mr C and that Child T had told her this. She further said that Child W had now also spoken of being physically assaulted by Mr C and that he had tried to drown her whilst bathing her a few weeks previously. She said she had not told Ms B at the time as Mr C had made her promise not to do so.

 

And this is obviously where proceedings finally began, right?

 

Wrong. Professionals agreed with mum that Mr C would move out, and that the children would stay with her.

 

(M) On 22nd February 2011, the children were all medically examined. The medical opinion was that the three older children had all been physically abused by Mr C, and that mother had failed to protect them and that the children should be removed to a place of safety.

 

As a result of that conclusion, the LA decided that proceedings were inevitable.

 

(N) The next day, (23.02.11) the social workers met with mum and told her that care proceedings were to be initiated. In a police interview at around the same time, Ms B said that she knew that Child T was hit more frequently when Mr C was taking drugs

 

 

(O) A Strategy Meeting was held on 25/2/11. Information had been gathered from the various health services involved and, for the first time, the facts of repeated bruising to Child T were drawn together with the knowledge of the current and previous injuries. Agencies were concerned that Ms B and MGM were aware of the abuse and had not acted to prevent it. It also appeared that there may have been discrepancies in the accounts they had given to various agencies. However there had been no evidence that either of them was responsible for any previous physical abuse and there was no indication that the children might be directly harmed by them, or did not wish to be with them. It was confirmed that care proceedings were to be initiated but that there should be no immediate attempt to remove the children.

 

(P) On 28/2/11 Ms B told SW2 that Child T had new bruising. Ms B claimed that she had asked Child T about this and he had said that the injuries had been inflicted by that social worker, SW2. Later that day Child T was taken to Accident & Emergency, NMUHT, in the company of his mother, a different Social worker and an interpreter. Child T said that the “lady” hit him. When asked what the lady looked like and how she did it, he was unsure. Following a medical examination, where new bruising was confirmed, and some new bruising was seen on Child W, all four children were brought into the care of the local authority.

 

 

 

 

On this one, I’m afraid that there is blame – it isn’t just a failure to predict something unpredictable, it isn’t taking an informed decision that the risk was manageable and the outcome turned out bad. This is a basic failure not to recognise what risk looks like and what to do with it.

 

I feel bad for the people involved, and who knows what the workloads and pressures were at the time; but I’m afraid that this is systemic failure, not just making a judgment call that proved wrong after the event.  It is REALLY, really hard to see why that vital letter from the paediatrician at (C) never got escalated into a child protection issue. The social worker never discussed it with her manager, and it did not get escalated into a Legal Planning Meeting.

 

If this is happening at Haringey, which must be alive like no other authority to the perils of getting child protection decisions wrong, something has gone very badly awry – perhaps locally, perhaps nationally.

 

Again, as with Keanu Williams, the case was effectively ring-fenced into a ‘child in need’ case at an early stage, and thoughts about child protection disappeared once the decision was made that this was a “child in need” case.  Even then, things aren’t great – he wasn’t properly treated as a “child in need” with a formal plan and review system. He just got lost.

 

 

I agreed with Eileen Munro that when one looks at Daniel Pelka’s case through the eyes of any individual professional it is hard to say that they got it wrong and that another worker in their shoes would not have acted similarly, but that’s not the case here.

 

In many ways, this Serious Case Review raises more worrying issues than the Baby P one – in that case, the local authority never had in their hands the medical evidence that would have allowed them to save Baby P. Here, the evidence was handed over and simply stuck in a filing cabinet without its significance being absorbed or considered until this child and his siblings sustained many more months of physical abuse.

 

I’m not sure that it gives us ‘lessons to be learned’ in general practice – the individual failings here were so pronounced and obvious that the real lesson is ‘if people don’t do their jobs properly, bad things can happen’.

 

Haringey’s Local Safeguarding board response, in the interests of fairness, is here  – and the incidents were two years ago, so they have had time to make some changes.

 

http://www.haringeylscb.org/haringey_lscb_s_response_to_the_scr_of_child_t-3.pdf

 

(I didn’t think it was great, to be honest, and it was very light on how they would prevent social workers wrongly going down the ‘child in need’ path when child protection is the real issue. Or that a strat meeting could so utterly misunderstand what the medics were saying. But at least there’s now a powerpoint strategy.  )

 

 

 

 

*For those who have made it thus far, Omphaloskepsis is ‘navel-gazing’ – it came into prominence during the Renaissance, when there was much debate about what a painter should do when painting the midriffs of Adam and Eve. Did they have belly buttons, or having never been in the womb, were they smooth?  If God made Man in his own image, does God have a belly button, or not? Because this was such a controversial issue, many such paintings just have hands or branches covering the vital area.

7 Comments

Posted in assessment of risk, serious case review and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

“As a drunkard uses a lamppost…”

Posted on May 14, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

 

 A discussion of the new CAFCASS figures on care proceedings issued by Local Authority area. Warning, contains maths, guesswork and ranting.

http://www.cafcass.gov.uk/media/147399/care_demand_per_child_population_by_la_under_embargo_until_9th_may_2013.pdf

 

“He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost – not for illumination, but for support”   – Winston Churchill

 

 They are interesting though, as the very least, they show up the real differences from area to area of the country. Some of that isn’t terribly surprising, one would not be shocked, for example that inner cities have higher rates of care proceedings than say Saffron Walden.  But there does seem to be quite a lot of variance even taking into account that different authorities have different social problems

 One might be surprised, for example, to see that Hackney have a lower number of care proceedings per 10,000 children than those notorious hot-beds of poverty, erm Kensington and Westminster.  Or indeed that Hackney’s figures on care proceedings per 10,000 children are now twice as high as they were in the 2008 post Baby P spike. Am scratching my head about that one.

 What is also, of course interesting, is looking at an authority and comparing it to its neighbours.  And also, as a long standing local authority locum lawyer, I can also use the chart as a handy guide to where I haven’t worked yet, and which authorities I’d probably be bored stiff in   (I won’t be taking a job in the Isles of Scilly any time soon, based on this chart)

 It isn’t terribly surprising that overall, one can see a big spike post Baby P  (that’s due in part to the increased referrals, in part to the greater willingness of local authorities to take action, in part due to a reluctance to manage risks at home that might previously have been managed, and in part due to the numbers having been artificially depressed by the double whammy of the PLO and the jacking up of court fees)

 Although 13 of the 94 authorities didn’t get this spike, they actually issued on a SMALLER proportion in the year post Baby P – including Hackney.

 You can also see that whilst a number of authorities have seen that spike settle down and decrease (though not back to pre Baby P levels) the overall trend is still increasing, from an average of 6 proceedings  per 10,000 children pre Baby P, to 8 the year after, to 9.7 in 2012/13.   And quite a few authorities are issuing MORE proceedings per 10,000 children than they were in the year post Baby P.

 [One should also bear in mind that most proceedings involve more than one child, so the actual number of CHILDREN subject to care proceedings per 10,000 children is higher than 9.7, how much higher is hard to say. I’d guess that the AVERAGE number of children per care proceedings is about 1.5 – you get a lot of babies, but also a lot of large sibling groups]

 

As the other CAFCASS stats show

 http://www.cafcass.gov.uk/news/2013/april_2013_care_application_statistics.aspx

 April 2013’s figures were 20% higher than April 2012’s  (which were themselves already a high base)

 And February 2013 hit 999 applications, the highest for any month ever.  (and bear in mind that February is a short month, and it is not historically one of the spike months – which are normally coinciding with imminent long school holidays, so June/July and Christmas period)

 On my guess, those 999 applications represent 1,500 children.

 And between March 2012 and April 2013, CAFCASS received 11,064 applications   (or on my guess, 16,000-17,000 children were made the subject of care proceedings in that year)

 This all makes me a little nervous  – because when you look at the national figures for adoption recruitment, the English authorities approved 2655 adopters in the whole of last year.

 http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/xls/u/20130326%20underlying%20data%20for%20maps.xls#’Map C’!A1

 

Now of course, not all of the children who came into proceedings need to be adopted – one hopes that MOST of them stay with mum and dad, some more are placed with family members, some of them will be too old to be adopted even if they can’t be placed with family members. So the 16,000 children is a MUCH MUCH higher figure than the children who need adoptive placements as a result of coming into care proceedings – I don’t have any hard data to extrapolate that. *

 *[Other than the same Government adoption stats that showed 2655 adopters approved in 2012, showed 5750 children waiting for adoptive placements, which I’ve written about previously. But that doesn’t tell me how many of those children had been identified as needing a placement THAT year  ]

 That might be one of those pieces of management information that Norgrove identified as being lacking in the family justice system – what are the outcomes for children who come into the public law Court arena?   Would be much better to have some proper hard and fast statistical analysis, rather than my hamfisted bungling. 

 [By the same token, it seems to me utterly ludicrous that we have figures on the number of CASES, when what we want to know, what we actually care about, surely is the number of CHILDREN?  ]

 But it does seem to me, that there’s serious potential for more children to be coming into the State system than the State has resources to deal with. There are, of course, three ways of tackling that problem (if indeed it is a problem). Reduce the number of children who come IN to care proceedings, reduce the number who come OUT needing placements outside of families, and increase the number of adopters who can meet the need where the Court have made that serious decision. 

 I am in some doubt as to whether the Family Justice Review changes are going to reduce the numbers of children coming IN, or the numbers coming OUT. 

 Of course, I could quite easily be wrong, and just be a pessimist clutching at lampposts in the absence of straws.

4 Comments

Posted in adoption, cafcass, research and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

“Two thirds of children who died of abuse in 2012 could have been saved”

Posted on January 22, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

An examination of this very shocking claim from the Children’s Rights Alliance for England report, and discussion of the report itself.

This is a very interesting report, with very weighty contributors. The report is scathing and coruscating of the way that Children’s Rights and issues affecting children is dealt with in the UK, particularly by the Government. I found the tone a bit polemical and overtly political, but there is no doubt that the authors care passionately about children’s welfare and are extremely angry and fearful about the failings they identify.

If you are worried about where we are currently going as a nation, or care passionately about the nation’s children, this report is a must-read. (I did find it too overtly Tory-bashing, but it is still for all of its political slants a meaningful and strong document)

The report is here:- http://www.crae.org.uk/assets/files/s%20Rights%202012.pdf

Here are some of the headline points they open with, and they are shocking.

• Forty-eight children died as a result of ‘deliberately inflicted injury, abuse or neglect’ in 2011-12. Sixty-five per cent of these deaths were ‘modifiable’ – there were factors involved in the death indicating that achievable steps could be taken to reduce the risk of future deaths.

• Between April 2009 and April 2010, Tasers were used on under-18s a total of 144 times. In the previous 12 month period Tasers were used on children 102 times – an increase of 41%.

• Thirty-three children have died in custody in England and Wales since 1990. In January 2012, two children died within a week.

• Official statistics published in November 2012 reported that the number of children going missing from foster care had increased by 19% in the previous year.

• More than 3,000 foster children are estimated to have gone missing in the year up to March 2012. As of 31 March 2012 there were a reported 1% still missing from care.

• In 2011 only 13.9% of children in care achieved good GCSE grades (A* to C) in both English and mathematics, compared to 58.6% of their peers. The attainment gap has risen from 37.2 in 2007 to 44.7 in 2011.

• When they visit a looked after child, social workers are required to speak to the child in private, but only 39% of children say that this happens on every visit, and 5% of children said that this never happens.

• Official figures published in November 2012 revealed that of 6,610 care leavers aged 19, 36% (2,390) were not in education, employment or training. This percentage is at its highest since 2008 (when it was 24%).

Action for Children’s analysis of the impact of Government spending decisions on vulnerable children and families found that family support services have been significantly affected by cuts to local authority spending. Out of 48 family support managers questioned:

• 13% of managers had seen a decrease in the number of hours that staff were able to spend with families and children in the last 12 months;

• More than a quarter of managers (27%) reported a decrease in funding. 4% of services reported a budget increase;

 • 44% of managers reported that the number of new referrals is rising, compared to the previous six months;

• According to almost two-thirds (62%) of the managers, families are facing increasingly severe problems

I was staggered to read here that this country is Tasering children. I knew that the number of children who die from abuse each year is roughly one a week, so 48 is obviously tragic and shocking though not surprising to me. The claim that 65% were ‘modifiable’ is probably what is going to be reported in the papers in lines with the headline I have used for this piece.

Let’s have a look at the specific bits in the report on this:-

Statutory guidance sets out the procedures to be followed when a child dies.

Two processes are conducted to review child deaths.

A rapid response by key professionals is undertaken to investigate each individual unexpected death of a child.

A Child Death Overview Panel will also conduct an overview of all child deaths in the area covered by the Local Safeguarding Children Board (LSCB). Either of these processes can trigger a Serious Case Review.

Child death review processes became mandatory in April 2008, though LSCBs have been able to implement these functions since April 2006.

There were 4,012 child death reviews in the year ending 31 March 2012. This is slightly lower than the number of reviews carried out in the previous year.

Official data shows that there were 784 ‘modifiable’ deaths in England in 2011-12. A modifiable death is the official term given to a death where one or more factors could be modified (changed) to reduce the risk of future child deaths. (This is the same proportion as the previous year – 20% of the total number of child deaths reviewed)

The age breakdown of the 784 ‘modifiable’ deaths is as follows:

• Newborns under the age of 27 days accounted for 45% of modifiable child deaths (an increase of 12% on the previous year)

• Infants aged between 28 and 364 days accounted for 21% of modifiable child deaths

• Children aged between 1 and 4 years accounted for 12% of modifiable child deaths

• Children aged between 15 and 17 years accounted for 9% of modifiable child deaths

• Children aged between 10 and 14 accounted for 7% of modifiable child deaths

• Children aged between 5 and 9 years accounted for 6% of modifiable child deaths.

Older children who died aged 15-17 years were more likely to have modifiable factors identified in their deaths, with 32% of this age group having modifiable factors identified, compared to 18% of children aged under one-year.

Of the 43 children that died in England in 2011-12 as a result of deliberately inflicted injury, abuse or neglect over half (28) were deemed to have modifiable factors.

Six per cent (45) of the 784 children who died where modifiable factors were identified were, or had been, subject to a child protection plan at the time of death; and 50 of the 784 children were or had been subject to a statutory order at the time of death.

The EHRC’s Human Rights Review states that local authority mechanisms for investigating and learning from serious cases of ill-treatment may be ‘insufficient’. The Review reiterates the concerns expressed in the Munro Review that serious case reviews are failing to identify the core issues that prevent child protection professionals from protecting children. In addition, the EHRC concludes that agencies often fail to work together effectively to prevent the ill-treatment of children.

The report notes that in child protection cases there is often a blurring of boundaries between different agencies. This lack of communication means that at-risk children can fall through the gaps.

So the 781 child deaths that were reviewed covered a wide range of causes, and it is the 48 who died from abuse that the report is focussing on. I see no reason to dispute that the figures about whether the deaths were ‘modifiable’ are accurate figures and that the decision as to whether they were ‘modifiable’ (or preventable, in plain English) are accurately taken from the investigation into those deaths.

That is a shocking figure. Not least given that we have all been working under the shadow of Baby P for over four years now, with numbers of care proceedings having gone up nearly 50% over that time.

There is an argument that somewhere along the line since Baby P, perhaps explicitly, perhaps in an underlying and unconscious trend, that the nation has moved in child protection terms quite far along the “child rescue” side of the scale rather than “family preservation” and that underpinning that is the understandable desire amongst social workers, and maybe even Courts not to have another tragedy like Baby P, and that perhaps, buried deep under that is the notion that separating more families is a price worth paying to avoid that.

But we don’t seem to have reduced the numbers of child deaths caused by abuse (at least not appreciably) and this report is decent evidence to suggest that even in the most hyper aware culture of ‘child rescue’ we have had in this country, 28 children died of abuse where this could have been avoided.

If there has been a lurch down the ‘child rescue’ side of the scale, as some commentators suggest, has that actually had any positive benefits for the children of the UK compared to the negative aspects of the system not properly balancing ‘family preservation’?

As I was recently suggesting in my post about Baby P, unless you become as a society so risk averse that any sniff of risk results in removal of children, you can’t necessarily tell which children who are at risk will fall into that dreadful bracket.

It all seems terribly inevitable, when you do what the Press does and work backwards from the death to look at the history.

I’d suggest that this is a media fallacy – yes, if you start from the death and look at all of the concerns the outcome seems terribly inevitable, just as if you only interview people who have WON the national lottery you would establish that buying a lottery ticket inevitably leads to winning the lottery.

You need to be aware of how many people buy tickets and don’t have any life-changing event, to have any idea as to whether buying a lottery ticket is likely to lead to you winning the lottery.

Unless you look at the pool of children who have those sorts of pattern of concerns and bruises and worries who end up being able to be safely managed at home, which of course nobody ever does, you don’t get an accurate picture of what risks, if any, do inevitably lead to child deaths, and which are just professionals weighing up the interest of keeping a family together and managing risk against ‘safety first’ and breaking up a family, and who with the magical benefit of hindsight maybe got that balance wrong with tragic consequences.

A thought-provoking report. Worth a read.

12 Comments

Posted in research and tagged , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Imaginary written submissions

Posted on January 9, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

[These are imaginary written submissions, in relation to an application for an Emergency Protection order  – in reality, one wouldn’t have the opportunity to make them, but they bear some resemblance to what the advocate representing the mother might have said in addressing the bench, though almost certainly in less florid and melodramatic terms.  I have been very careful, as any advocate would, not to misrepresent any facts]

  1. This application for an Emergency Protection Order is made by the Local Authority. The mother has had very limited notice of the hearing, and very limited opportunity to see the case put against her. She has had to defend her position and persuade the Court not to make this most draconian of orders without having the opportunity to see the Local Authority case in writing, or to put into writing her own account of events.

It is for those very reasons that the Courts have set down authorities that making an order of this kind is draconian, and requires “compelling evidence”,  particularly, the decision of RE X (A CHILD) sub nom RE X (EMERGENCY PROTECTION ORDERS) (2006) [2006] EWHC 510 (Fam)

  1. I will come on to those matters in a moment; but the Court should have in mind the context that to remove a child from a parent at any stage requires cogent evidence that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold is made out, but that beyond that, that the decision to remove is a proportionate one to make far in advance of assessments or a final hearing bearing in mind the alleged nature of the risk, and that to do so at an Emergency Protection Order stage requires extraordinarily compelling evidence that it is effectively the only thing to do, it is an order of last resort.  And that it should only be contemplated if imminent danger is actually established.
  1. The legal context is then set out in Re X, and the predecessor case, also Re X. In X Council v B (Emergency Protection Orders) [2004] EWHC 2015 (Fam); [2005]1 FLR 341,  

      Quoting from the earlier case :-

An EPO, summarily removing a child from his parents, is a ‘draconian’ and

‘extremely harsh’ measure, requiring ‘exceptional justification’ and

‘extraordinarily compelling reasons’. Such an order should not be made   

unless the FPC is satisfied that it is both necessary and proportionate and that

no other less radical form of order will achieve the essential end of promoting

the welfare of the child. Separation is only to be contemplated if immediate 

separation is essential to secure the child’s safety: ‘imminent danger’ must be

‘actually established’.

 

 

The evidence in support of the application for an EPO must be full,

detailed, precise and compelling. Unparticularised generalities will not

suffice.

The sources of hearsay evidence must be identified. Expressions of opinion

must be supported by detailed evidence and properly articulated reasoning

  1. So there must be a serious emergency, to justify having such an important hearing in such a rush, and there must be compelling and detailed evidence that an EPO is the only real course of action, and the applicant has to establish imminent danger; the burden of proof is on them to prove that there IS, not on the parent to prove that there ISN’T.
  1. Let us look at what the Local Authority claim this “emergency” is.  The child is thirteen months old.  It is said by them that he has been known to Social Services throughout his life, and that is true. It is also said by them that he has spent a period of time in voluntary foster care, and that is also true. He was in voluntary foster care for around two months, but has been at home with mother for nearly six months since then.  There have been periods of his life where he has been on the child protection register – the same is of course true of many children.
  1. It is accepted that there are positive reports from the health visitor and childminder, and the social worker accepts that the mother’s presentation around the child, and the child around her, is illustrative of a loving relationship.
  1. They say that the ‘emergency’ triggering event, is that yesterday, the mother took the child to a hospital appointment, and that the child had visible bruises.  
  1. That is also true. But what is also true is that the doctor who examined him has said is that the child was unwell and miserable and probably had a viral infection, that he had a history of aggressive behaviour including head-butting the floor, and that there is nowhere within the medical report a conclusion that those bruises were non-accidental, or likely to be non-accidental, or could possibly be non-accidental.  
  1. The best evidence about these bruises comes from the paediatrician – she saw the bruises, she saw the child, she took the history, she is after all, the expert in these matters. That’s the evidence before the Court, and it concludes that the bruises were caused accidentally. We deal in evidence, not mere suspicion.  Where there is suspicion and it is relied upon, there must be evidence to support that suspicion.
  1. The Local Authority say that there is a history of previous bruising, and again, that is true. But it is not for them to put two and two together and make sixteen. The doctor examining him saw the child, took the history from mother, read the previous history, and if the doctor felt that there were reasonable grounds to believe that the bruises were non-accidental, then she would have said so when asked to prepare this report for Court.
  1. The case has been brought to Court, for what I have to remind the Court is the most draconian type of order, requiring compelling evidence, because the social worker has made her own diagnosis that the doctor, who is qualified to examine children and draw conclusions, has got this wrong.
  1. Well, in the spirit of generosity, perhaps the doctor has got this wrong. Perhaps, and this is not the mother’s case at all, there is a history here which needs looking at with a fresh pair of eyes. The mother is confident that another paediatrician will come to the same conclusions and that these lingering suspicions will be removed. 
  1. But to REMOVE this child from mother’s care, because the paediatrician might have got this wrong, cannot be the right thing to do. If the Local Authority consider that there is something here which needs to be investigated, then they can issue an application for a care order, set out their concerns and their evidence for those concerns on paper, and the Court can consider whether an independent paediatric assessment of the child is warranted.  That is an argument for another day.
  1. What these circumstances do not add up to, in any way shape or form, is the sort of compelling evidence that this child has been suffering significant harm or is likely to do so, and that he should be removed from his mother’s care and put in foster care, much less so on such short notice, with such a paucity of evidence before the Court.  
  1. The Local Authority point to some historical bruising – seven months ago, there was some bruising. The mother says that this was caused in play with some other children. A medical report at that time felt that it was suspicious and might be non-accidental.  The child came into foster care during a police investigation – the mother cooperated with that, and as we have heard, two months later the child came home.
  1. What they try to do now, is to add that, where they have a medical report which does give rise to some legitimate concern, to the situation today, where they have a medical report that raises no concerns at all, and try to force the two things together. As I said earlier, this is a case of trying to make two and two make five.
  1. Respectfully, they cannot do that. If we had been here seven months ago, with the report from the doctor saying there were suspicious bruises, then perhaps there would be a case to deal with. But something can’t be an emergency, if you wait for seven months to bring it up. Something can’t require the court to urgently intervene to protect the child if the LA had him in care and were happy to send him home five months ago.  And something that the paediatrician who saw the child yesterday already knew about and had read in the medical records, when they decided that the child was safe to go home from hospital with his mother, can’t now become evidence that the child is not safe at home and has to be removed. 
  1. If the previous bruises made the paediatrician yesterday look at the bruises with a more cynical and suspicious eye, then that is one thing, but that isn’t what happened. In the light of knowing about those previous bruises, the paediatrician was satisfied that what mum was saying, what her own eyes showed her – an aggressive hyperactive child with a temperature and a virus who was head-banging, had got those bruises by doing just that.  
  1. The Local Authority essentially say, “well, she should have done”, but that is neither here nor there. In terms of actual evidence, she didn’t. There is no medical opinion that those bruises seen yesterday were caused non-accidental.
  1.  This isn’t an emergency. The child is at home with mum, safe and well. The hospital didn’t feel the need yesterday to say “this is risky, we can’t send him home”.  
  1. The child doesn’t need protection. There is no evidence of significant harm here. The highest it can be put is that the Local Authority would want a fresh medical opinion looking at all the notes.
  1. There is no need for an order, particularly the most draconian order that can be made by a Court. 
  1. Is the evidence here “extraordinary compelling”?   Have the Local Authority actually established imminent danger?   In setting out why the evidence of the social worker, who has not seen these bruises, should be preferred to that of the independent expert paediatrician, who has, have the Local Authority provided evidence which is “full, detailed, precise and compelling”?  With “detailed evidence and properly articulated reasoning”?
  1. In my respectful submissions, they have come nowhere near, and the application should be refused.

 

 

Well, unless you have been under a rock for a few years, you will know that the name of the child in the case is Peter Connolly, and you probably twigged that very early on.   

 

You will also know that the Local Authority DID NOT issue an emergency court application, on either the day the paediatrician saw the child or the day after.

 

If they had, would it have saved Peter? Probably not, as you can see here, the case against making the EPO is overwhelming.   I have to be candid and say that if they had rung me, with the medical opinion being as it was, I would have advised that an EPO had no prospect of success. It wasn’t even finely balanced.

 

You may be thinking that I have stacked the deck here, by making it an Emergency Protection Order, where the bar is so much higher following the Re X decisions than the test for an ICO. 

 

Well, I haven’t stacked the deck, because there were just two days, and only 1 full working day between the paediatrician seeing Peter and him being killed. So an Emergency Protection Order was the only order that Haringey could have applied for that would have had him out of the home before he was killed.

 

If such an application had been made, it would have been resisted, along similar lines to this – the test for an EPO is very high, it needs extraordinarily compelling evidence, the Court need to be satisfied that there is actual evidence of imminent danger, and that the paediatrician who examined the child didn’t make a diagnosis of NAI.

 

That’s not to defend Haringey – there were clearly mistakes made, largely at the point when having got an earlier paediatric report saying non-accidental bruises, they didn’t issue. Nor did they issue at the point where they had the child in foster care and the point came where he was going home to mother unless they got a Court order.

 

Nor is it to castigate those who would represent a parent in this situation. Far from it, those are exactly the points that should have been made, and any barrister or solicitor representing a parent against those facts would have been pretty shabby if they hadn’t left the court room with their client going home with the child.

If I’d been representing Peter’s mother on that day, with those facts, I would have fought to make sure the EPO wasn’t made. And it would have been the right thing to do, regardless of how it later turned out. The Court have to decide cases on evidence, and in this case, the medical evidence to justify an EPO wasn’t there.

 

My point is that it would have been extraordinarily hard to save baby Peter’s life AT that critical point, the last chance to intervene to save him simply would not have worked. If the LA had flown in the face of the paediatric evidence and sought an EPO, they would not have got one. The best they could have hoped for would be that there would be an ICO hearing a week later. By which time it was too late.

 

From what information there was, at the last possible moment to save him, you would not have persuaded a Court that he needed to be taken into foster care there and then.  It is very easy to make all sorts of different decisions in hindsight, but I do believe that it is worth bearing that in mind  – the media portrayal is that this was an inevitable course of action that could have been averted at any time, but I would suggest that things often appear inevitable when you are working back from a known outcome.  If you had been there, at an EPO hearing on that day, with the facts that were known at the time, you would have been appalled if the Court had granted the EPO.  

 

[of course, had the paediatrician seen all that was there to be seen, then firstly Peter would have remained in hospital instead of going home, and secondly, there would have been compelling evidence of imminent danger, and the whole case is transformed]

3 Comments

Posted in assessment of risk, experts and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

There’s a small boat made of china, going nowhere on my mantelpiece

Posted on January 8, 2013 by suesspiciousminds

 

Laplace, prediction, and why we might, everywhere we go, always take the weather with us in care proceedings

 

By the start of the nineteenth century, scientists had discovered a great many of the principles of physics and particularly how various forces acted on objects in predictable and mathematical ways.  This led some scientists to hubristically predict that there was nothing new to be found in the world of physics   (obviously not aware that radioactivity, splitting the atom and quantum physics were completely unknown to them at that point).

 

Anyway, once you discover the various mathematical principles about forces and objects and how forces act upon objects, one starts thinking about whether you could predict something with absolute certainty if you had enough information.

 

Being a previously sad geeky sciency Suesspiciousminds Junior, I had certainly wondered in my adolescence whether you could, if you had really fast computers and knew everything, no longer be guessing a toin coss, but knowing how it would end up.  

 

That’s something which has also exercised the minds of a great many gamblers, since Roulette is essentially just an exercise in predictable physics (speed of spin of the table, angle and speed at which the ball is dropped) – predictable, but extremely complex, and if you could actually predict which slot the ball would drop into, with certainty, you would be an extraordinarily rich person.

 

Well, someone else,  Pierre-Simon Laplace took that a stage further, and suggested that with a great enough intellect (computers weren’t really around at that stage, other than Babbage’s mechanical one which was more of a theoretical concept than something you could actually boot up and play Farmville on), you could calculate the entire future of the universe and the movement of every particle.

 

“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”

 

This is really the birth of determinism, the idea that you can, given enough information, accurately predict future outcomes, or more broadly, that given a set of conditions, the outcome which emerges from those conditions is the only one which COULD have emerged.  

 

[Sadly, I learned when doing a bit of quick research, that Laplace’s other claim, that Pope Callixtus had once excommunicated a comet, was fallacious. I have a later essay planned on how the law has treated animals and inanimate objects, and that would have fitted perfectly with the excommunication of beetles and the pig who was put on trial for murder]

 

I won’t get any further into whether Laplace’s grand conjecture is true or not (if only in a deeply theoretical sense), and it is still debated – Einstein firmly lined up with Laplace on believing that there were firm mathematical laws and principles underpinning all matter and physics and that it would therefore be possible to predict things with certainly, but that there were just things that were yet unknown to us that prevented such predictions being made. Many others think otherwise, and that there’s an element of randomness, particularly at the quantum level that makes that impossible.

 

Let’s move away from correctly predicting the motion, position and velocity of every particle in the universe and onto a smaller scale, and some predictions which are common to every one of us, and which enter our homes on a daily basis.

 

And that allows me to  yank it back to care proceedings – in one of the dominant cases of the 1990’s, Re H and R 1996, the House of Lords grappled with the issue of what ‘likely’ meant, when considering whether a child was ‘likely to suffer significant harm’  and this is one of the more memorable passages from Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead :-

 

 

In everyday usage one meaning of the word likely, perhaps its primary meaning, is probable, in the sense of more likely than not. This is not its only meaning. If I am going walking on Kinder Scout and ask whether it is likely to rain, I am using likely in a different sense. I am enquiring whether there is a real risk of rain, a risk that ought not to be ignored. In which sense is likely being used in this subsection?

 

 

And if you know the law, you will grasp that the latter is where we ended up at in terms of likelihood  – it does not mean something that is more likely than not to happen, but a risk that cannot sensibly be ignored.

 

But in a real sense now, I am going to talk about the science of predicting the weather – will it rain on Kinder Scout today or not?

 

As you will know, the field of predicting the weather has moved beyond hanging up pine-cones or (my standby) looking at whether cows are lying down in a field   (a belief I can’t shed, despite knowing how stupid it is, and one which gets me regularly mocked by Ms SuesspiciousMinds)

Meteorology instead uses a combination of :-

 

  1. Gathering lots of information about the current situation
  2. Applying mathematical principles and formula to predict how features in one part of the system will interact with another
  3. Calculating therefore what a particular part of the system is likely to do at a future point

 

 

And thus, is a system that would make Laplace very proud.

 

 

The principles that govern whether we get rain, or snow, or a nice bright sunny day, are pretty uncontroversial. There isn’t a band of quarrelling meteorologists bickering about whether isobars are of any significance at all or whether the warm fronts we see so much of on the television are merely illusory.  So, the principles are all there. The mathematical models for what these set of conditions will do over the next few hours are there (based largely on thermodynamics and fluid dynamics), and have been refined and improved, the collection of information about those conditions has vastly improved over the last thirty years, as has the quality of computers doing the calculations.

 

But what is your first answer, quickly, when I ask

 

“Do you think we can reliably forecast the weather?”

 

 

Making my own little forecast, your instant reaction was no, or that we are hopeless. You may, if you are a fair-minded person, have had a momentary recalibration and decided that we are better at it than we used to be, or even that we are not bad at it now.

 

But let’s go back to Lord Nicholls – it is March, you are about to go up Kinder Scout  and the weather forecast says that it is probably not going to rain. Do you take a coat, or not?

 

Is the risk that the weather forecast will be wrong when it says there won’t be rain, a risk that cannot be sensibly be ignored, if you find yourself up on a mountain without a coat?

 

You may have had nagging at the back of your mind, or the front of your mind if you are a science geek or liked Jeff Goldlum’s character in JurassicPark, the notion of chaos theory at this point. You may even have recalled the image of a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane on the other side of the world   [incidentally, probably the most misunderstood image in the history of science  – it doesn’t CAUSE the hurricane, it is about how small factors can amplify and make things harder to predict]

 

Essentially, small factors amplify with time, and the way they amplify is hard to predict, so even the very best computer forecasts become more and more unreliable with the passage of time. Forecasts are far more reliable about the next few hours than they are about next week, and break down almost entirely after sixteen days.  In numerical models, extremely small errors in initial values double roughly every five days for variables such as temperature and wind velocity

 

[So every time the newspapers tell you that there are predictions that this is going to be a “barbecue summer”  remember that the accuracy beyond 16 days is all to cock]

 

 

Okay, so predicting the weather, which is based on inanimate objects, which act under the influence of known forces, in known ways, and which the science of meteorology has been refining and checking against known outcomes to improve the prediction models, isn’t all that accurate and is not very accurate at all after 16 days.

 

Now, I will pull us back to law.

 

At the conclusion of a criminal trial, things are simple  – did this person do what they were accused of, and has that been proven. It’s similar with any other sort of legal dispute  – did one person prove that x happened, and what punishment / compensation should the Court give.   The Court doesn’t really have to predict the future – a burglar isn’t convicted of an offence of burglary only if the Court think he will do another burglary next week.

 

 

Care proceedings aren’t like that – whilst we may well spend some time arguing about precisely what happened in the past and the Court may have to decide that if we can’t hit on a form of words which everyone can agree, mostly what we are doing is predicting the future.

 

  • Have the improvements seen in the mother’s parenting at a mother and baby placement, or in contact, mean that she can now safely care for the child, or is she going to slip back into her old ways once she stops being watched all the time?
  • Is this father, who has been using heroin for 6 years but has been clean for 4 months, going to remain clean, or will he slip back? (What if he was clean for 6 months, but had one lapse?)
  • Will the mother, now that she has seen how risky an individual her new boyfriend is, stay away from him when the proceedings are over, or will he be back in her life and have the chance to hurt the child?
  • Will the parents who broke their four year old’s leg by handling him far too roughly, ever do anything like that again?

 

 

I have probably sledge-hammered this point, rather than making it in a subtle way, but if top scientists with huge computers can’t predict whether it will rain on Kinder Scout tomorrow, how can we possibly predict with certainty whether the mother will succumb to text messages from the dodgy boyfriend and keep seeing him in secret?

 

Professor Monroe touched on this in her first report –  there was for a long time a body of thought in social work, or social work management, that we could avoid the twin pitfalls of social work    – being too soft and letting children get hurt, or being too hard and breaking up families who could have stayed together (Baby P at one end, Cleveland and Orkney at the other) by having more information, more accurate models, and getting the decisions just right.

 

1.43

Professionals can make two types of error: they can over-estimate or underestimate the dangers facing a child or young person. Error cannot be eradicated and this review is conscious of how trying to reduce one type of error increases the other.

1.44

The public tend to learn of cases of abuse after a child or young person has died or suffered serious harm and then, with the benefit of hindsight, make judgments on how it was easy to see that the child or young person was in danger and would have been safer if removed. This is of course not the way the issue looks for the professionals who only have foresight. Removing a child or young person can protect them from immediate risk of significant harm, but is understandably traumatic for them. Maltreated children or young people who come into care often benefit in the long term,  but although the outcomes achieved by looked after children have improved, in too many cases, the potential of the care system to compensate for early harm is unrealised for reasons which are well documented.

 

Our society rightly values the birth family as the primary source of care for children and young people and disrupting that bond is seen as a serious step to take, requiring close scrutiny before the courts will grant the legal authority to do so.

The birth family equally presents a mixture of benefits and dangers. A good assessment involves weighing up these relative risks and benefits and deciding which option, on balance, carries the highest probability of the best outcomes for the child. Neither option carries zero risk of harm.

1.45

In assessing the value of leaving the child in the same situation, professionals have to consider a balance of possibilities: to estimate how harmful it will be, to consider whether it might escalate and cause very serious harm or death. They also need to consider whether resources are locally available so that families can be helped to provide safer care and estimate how effective such interventions are likely to be.

1.46

All of these areas of uncertainty make decisions about children and young people’s safety and well-being very challenging. A well thought out decision may conclude that the probability of significant harm in the birth family is low. However, low probability events happen and sometimes the child left in the birth family is a victim of extreme violence and dies or is seriously injured is therefore very important. Public understanding that the death of a child may follow even when the quality of professional practice is high is therefore very important.

 

 

She says, and as you can see, I agree, that you just can’t hope to get every case right, when you predict the future, your predictions have limitations to their accuracy.  If you try to move down the safety first side of the scale, you will take children away unnecessarily. If you try to move down the keeping families together side of the scale, some children will be badly harmed at home.  The aim to just make the right decisions at the right time, in all case is simply never going to happen.

If the weather forecasters can’t get it right, neither can we.

You are dealing with people, with all their uncertainties, capriciousness and emotions, and you can’t predict exactly what they will do. The cases where you get it ‘just right’ may well end up being few and far between, and may well be more by luck than judgment.

 

A mother who is utterly resolute about remaining separate from her dangerous  ex-boyfriend, who understands what is at stake and how bad he is from her, may on any given day fluctuate about just how resolute she is. Maybe someone handsome smiled at her at a bus stop and she feels good about herself when he sends the text message and she deletes it without reading it. Maybe just before the text message came in, she caught sight of herself in a mirror and felt fat and unloveable. It is utterly impossible to predict that.  It seems easier to predict that a mother that tried to separate from ex boyfriend six times and always went back to him, and was caught out two weeks ago, probably won’t stick to her claims that it is all over and she will never see him again. But we can’t be SURE, we can only predict whether the risk is one that cannot be sensibly ignored.

 

 

None of that means that we simply give up, and either leave all children at home with their parents, or take away every child where there is a sniff of danger, but we do have to be honest with ourselves, and honest with society as a whole.

 

 

And we have to constantly test where we find ourselves on the scale of child rescue and family preservation – are we lurching too far down one end or another?  Are we risk averse, fearful of a Baby P headline and ignoring that those actions break up a family which could have stayed together, or running with a rule of optimism that small changes mean a good future prognosis and not seeing the full picture?

 

We are attempting to predict what human beings, with human emotions, will do in the future – not just in the next few days, or 16 days, but over the course of their children’s childhood.  And the very sort of parents that we attempt to do that with tend,  not always, but more often than not, to be emotionally fragile, damaged people who are chaotic and unpredictable in their actions.

 

 

 

Comments Off on There’s a small boat made of china, going nowhere on my mantelpiece

Posted in assessment of risk, threshold criteria, timescales and tagged , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.