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Archive for October 1st, 2007
Full Story:
http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0341.htm
SOCIAL workers are being prevented from helping Edinburgh’s vulnerable children because they are overloaded with bureaucracy, a union has warned.
John Stevenson, of Unison, called for an end to skilled professionals being weighed down by paperwork or having to ferry youngsters back and forth when they should be devising care plans to keep them from harm.
An HM Inspectorate of Education report into Edinburgh City Council’s child protection services on Thursday criticised the local authority for being slow in removing vulnerable children from dangerous situations.
The report followed an investigation in February and March, and since then the number of social workers in the city has risen sharply, from 114 to 143, with a further Pfund6 million being ploughed into the service.
But Mr Stevenson, who works in health and social care at the city council, said social workers were still not being freed up to do what they did.
He said: “There’s not enough administrative support. At the moment qualified social workers are spending their time trying to arrange taxis. You get a situation where a child is going to see their parents once a week and the social worker drives them there and back. That would be better done by someone else.
“We need more social work assistants and nursery nurses to do the work that social workers are not required to do. Progress has been made in this area, but more needs to be done.”
The HMIE report was critical of the uncoordinated approach taken to protecting children from abuse and neglect in their own homes. It found that when some children move home in the city they slip off the radar, while in other cases the authorities fail to act fast enough to remove youngsters from harmful situations. Mr Stevenson said social workers were not always given time to come up with detailed long-term plans because they were too busy with mundane tasks that less-skilled council employees could take care of.
“Some of the focus has gone off the planning side of things,” he said. “That is because some of the work they have to do does not take someone of their experience.”
The city’s education, children and families leader, Councillor Marilyne MacLaren, said improving support for social workers, as well as streamlining the computer system they use, were among her key aims to get the city’s child protection system on track.
01
Oct
07
CHILD ABUSE HITS RECORD HIGH
Full Story:
http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0340.htm
SICKENING physical and sex attacks on children in Paisley are increasing.
Shocking new figures show that disgusting assaults on tots and youngsters have risen to a record high in Renfrewshire.
Social workers were involved in 318 child protection cases during 2006/07 a rise of 166 cases compared to 2001/02.
And 87 youngsters were registered on a protection list after suffering emotional, physical or sexual abuse at the hands of parents or carers.
The appalling figures show that the problem of child abuse continues to plague the area.
Since 2000, there has been a steady increase in the number of referrals, investigations and abused children being put into protective care.
Last year, it was reported that 30 toddlers under the age of four years old were listed after being put through physical injury and neglect.
Three children under the age of eight were sexually abused at the hands of their guardian in Renfrewshire.
One Buddie, who was abused as a child, said: The figures are obviously worrying because any increase in instances of child abuse, even just one case, is one too many.
There is a public perception that a typical child molester is a big scarred, tattooed man, standing outside the school gates, but in reality, this is very rarely the case.
The typical molester is usually someone who knows the child, even a family member, as unpalatable as that is.
We need to do more to get this message across to the general public.
The new statistics , released by the Scottish Government, show the number of cases involving sexual abuse has dropped nationally, while emotional abuse and neglect soared.
A spokesman for Renfrewshire Council said: “Between 2000 and 2007, Scotland as a whole saw a 66 per cent rise in the number of children being referred to social work services because of child protection issues.
Renfrewshire has seen a similar long-term rise and between 2006 and 2007 referrals rose by 13 per cent nationally but only by 5.6 per cent in Renfrewshire.
Full Story:
http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0339.htm
Police were facing calls yesterday for a full inquiry after a suspected paedophile escaped to Australia and murdered an eight-year-old girl.
In a case which was being compared to that of the Soham killer Ian Huntley, Dante Arthurs was allowed to leave Britain despite being suspected of causing bodily harm to a 12-year-old girl in Bookham, Surrey, in 2001. The Times has learnt that one Surrey Police officer resigned and another faced a disciplinary inquiry as a result of botching the investigation.
Arthurs slipped through the net a second time two years later when police in Western Australia missed a chance to have him jailed for a sexual assault. Last week he pleaded guilty to the murder of Sofia Rodriguez-Urru-tia Shu, who was found dead in the lavatory of a Perth shopping centre by her brother. She had been beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled.
Yesterday her family told The Times that they were dismayed and angry to learn that she might not have died had British police pursued her killer several years ago. Sofias father, Gabriel, said: It has totally devastated us and amplified our grief. Sofias death could have been avoided.
Family friends called for an inquiry into Arthurs being allowed to move to Australia despite continuing inquiries into the alleged assault in Bookham six years ago. Bryan Rosling, the family priest, said that the case had disturbing links to that of Huntley, who faced previous sexual allegations that were not investigated properly.
This guy was allowed to slip through the laws fingers and commit his horrendous crime in 2006, he said. If he had been charged and convicted, Sofia might be alive and well today. At the very least he would have been known as a predator.
In the alleged incident in 2001, Arthurs was suspected of grabbing the young girl from behind, putting his hands over her nose and mouth. She managed to struggle free. He was questioned by police and his house was searched, but an identification parade was repeatedly postponed initially because of objections from Arthurs solicitor and by the time police were able to go ahead with it, the suspect was on his way to Australia.
Surrey Police did not tell Interpol that Arthurs was a suspect. Officers in Australia, unaware of Arthurs past until he murdered Sofia last June, said that they would have known far earlier if Interpol had been alerted.
Full Story:
http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0338.htm
Information about all landline and mobile phone calls made in the UK must be logged and stored for a year under new laws.
Data about calls made and received will also be available to 652 public bodies, including the police and councils.
The Home Office said the content of calls and texts would not be read and insisted the move was vital to tackle serious crime and terrorism.
But critics said it was another example of Britain’s “surveillance society”.
The new law, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, was signed off by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in July.
It requires phone companies to log data on every call or text made to and from every phone in Britain.
‘Different uses’
Since 2004, companies have voluntarily provided data, where available, if it was requested, but now they will required by law to retain it for a year.
Minister for Security and Counter-terrorism Tony McNulty told BBC Radio 4 that the data could provide three levels of information, the simplest being about the phone’s owner.
“Say some old lady has got difficulties with someone who’s repaired the gas in her house and has a mobile phone for somebody who’s clearly dodgy,” Mr McNulty said.
“The local authorities can just get the subscriber information next to that number.
“The second level of data is not simply the subscriber, but also the calls made by that phone.
“And the third level which is purely for the security forces, police, etc, is not just the subscriber information and the calls made, but also the calls coming in and location data – where the calls are made from.”
Personal ‘profile’
A person’s location can be pinpointed to within a few feet by identifying the mobile phone mast used to transmit their call.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights group Liberty, said people were more concerned than ever about their personal privacy, especially how many bodies had access to their phone records.
“There are actually a very broad range of purposes for which this information about who we’ve been phoning and when can be revealed,” Ms Chakrabarti said.
“It includes, for example, the Gaming Board, the Food Standards Authority and every district and county council in the country.”
She said requests for information would not be limited to those concerning serious crime and national security.
Full Story:
http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0337.htm
ONE SKILL at which we in Scotland truly excel is sweeping uncomfortable truths under the carpet. And it’s not only us as individuals. Our national institutions aren’t above turning a blind eye when they’re frightened about what they might see.
Take the issue of drug abused children. Over the summer, Scottish government documents – dubbed, in what must pass for humour in the civil service, “letters of assurance” – were quietly made public. These revealed that not only are the authorities unaware of which children are living with drug addict parents, they haven’t even counted them.
It was a stark illustration, as I said at the time, of just how low these shadow children are on the state’s priorities list: not even a statistic.
What surprised me most, though, was that this information was just accepted with an uninterested shrug of the shoulders. Few seemed worried that systematic failings in our child protection system are leaving tens of thousands of at-risk children unidentified and unprotected.
There was, though, much anguish over last week’s figures showing that nearly 2600 kids were placed on child protection registers last year. It’s 2600 too many, of course, but it’s only a shocking figure until you remember that there are about 21,000 addicts on methadone right now – a third of whom have kids. Even if we ignore all the addicts outwith the methadone programme and suppose they have an average of one-and-a-half kids each, that’s 10,500 children. Or, put another way, nearly 8000 children who are forced to live in the danger and squalor of a drug addict household, but aren’t on any register.
We need to face up to some hard truths about how the country we tell ourselves is compassionate and equitable treats its most vulnerable citizens.
In doing so, it will become apparent that serious problems require serious solutions.
It’s not just about more money – although if frontline services can’t protect the kids they know about now, why would they go out looking for more? But is it not also time to put the rights of drug abused children before the rights of their parents?
Why, for example, are we still subsidising drug dealers by giving their customers cash benefits? Is it not naive to think that an addicted mum’s child benefit is spent feeding and clothing her baby? Is there an argument for providing certain benefits in kind? Or a mechanism whereby certain benefits, such as child benefit, would follow the child, rather than the mother?
01
Oct
07
Naked fear on display
Full Story:
http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0336.htm
The furore over a picture in a gallery is an example of paedophobia run riot. We have lost touch with innocence
Last week a small art gallery in the north of England did a remarkable thing: it called the police and informed on itself. Staff at the Gateshead Baltic Centre were so worried that a photograph of two young girls one naked by the female American artist Nan Goldin might be considered child porn that they phoned the police and had them come and take the questionable picture away.
Publicity hungry art galleries usually phone the press when displaying controversial material like this, not the police. Now Northumbria police are investigating whether the picture one that is part of Elton Johns photographic collection violates the 1978 Protection of Children Act and are taking advice from the Crown Prosecution Service.
The photograph, entitled Klara and Edda Belly Dancing, features two young girls dancing at home not in a provocative way, either but in a kind of lets dress up and fool around way. One has her legs open and is wearing no knickers; her private parts are on full public display.
Is it art? I dont know. Could a paedophile be excited by it? Definitely. But then such people can be excited by looking through a Mothercare catalogue.
Should we get a police opinion on that too?
The interesting thing is that this photograph has been shown in art galleries around the world without controversy. Only in Britain has a gallery been so paranoid that it strikes me as a symptom of what I would called a growing outbreak of paedophobia that is, an irrational and growing panic about the threat posed by paedophiles. It is changing the way we think and act towards children for the worse. How did childhood lose its innocence and society its common sense?
Things were very different when I was a child growing up in the 1960s. It was a time when many young people in the West decided that to break the repressive bonds of bourgeois society and become truly liberated, you had to turn on your mind and take off your clothes preferably in public.
As a child with hippie parents, I was used to seeing parental nakedness in the privacy of our home and yes, Im still haunted by such sights. And there was plenty of nakedness in the public realm too. In parks, at parties and rock festivals there was always some hippie bird with her bouncing breasts and her hippie bloke with his bouncing bits.
Public nudity was all the revolutionary rage in 1968. That was the year John and Yoko appeared completely naked on the cover of their album Two Virgins and the English theatre got its first blast of full-frontal nudity with the hippie musical Hair. That was also the year that 15-year-old Goldin got her first camera.
As a child, I was expected to go nude in public, which was fun. As a young teenager I was expected to go nude in public which was a nightmare. Hippie orthodoxy claimed that by letting children run wild, free and starkers in public they would grow up to be healthy and the happy adults, free from the emotional and sexual hang-ups that had so blighted the 1950s generation.
But by the end of the Sixties things began to change. New fears about the rise of child pornography led to the creation of the 1978 act. This introduced the concept of the indecent photograph of a child to UK law. Indecent then and now means an image of anyone under 18 involved in sexual activity or thats sexually provocative.
The rise of the internet in the 1990s as a tool to distribute images of children, along with a small number of high-profile cases of sexual assault on children, helped create this mood of paedophobia.
We have reached a curious crossroads. We have become more liberal-minded about adult nakedness in public and totally anxious about naked children in public. A whole generation is being brought up with the idea that public nudity is wrong and even dangerous. Weve simply traded in the old pre1960s prudery for a new kind of repres-siveness, based on an exaggerated fear of paedophiles.
Let me explain. This summer I was sitting in the park soaking up the sun, watching my naked three-year-old son playing in the fountain. He was dashing and splashing through great jets of cold water when a man with tattoos on his face pointed and said, Oi, mate, you shouldnt be letting him go around with no clothes on, not around here.
Later that same afternoon a woman next to me turned to her friend and said, Its not right, letting them go around like that! Her friend nodded in agreement and said, No, not these days it aint.
It was then that I noticed that my son was the only child playing in the fountain naked. All the rest were clothed. I dont mean they just had little pants or swimming costumes on; they were practically in kiddie burqas.
I sensed that to those on the benches around the fountain the sight of a small, naked boy laughing and playing in the water wasnt a natural or joyous sight. It was a cause for alarm.
Its not just me being oversensitive. Ive spoken to numerous parents who all say the same thing: naked children arent considered normal. They get disapproving looks. One mum told me she had been told by park attendants to cover her child up or leave. Another dad tells me he regularly gets grunts and glares from other dads. They give you this look that says, What sort of man would let their child go around like that? One anxious father I know has decided its not worth the hassle and now insists his four-year-old son wears pants when in public.
And its not only adults who disapprove of my childs nakedness, but other children as well. When my naked son ran from the fountain to the swings one girl pointed at my son and said, Thats disgusting!
The naked child, once a normal part of public life, has become a public nuisance a source of embarrassment and parental anxiety for one simple reason: paedophilia. Or to be more precise, paedophobia, the fear that someone is secretly taking pictures of our innocent child and then posting them on the internet and using them for perverted sexual gratification.
Consequently, playing naked in the park has joined the list of disapproved activities of our paedophobic times, such as taking photos at the nativity play or talking to a child who isnt yours.
You tell yourself: dont give in to the fear. Statistically speaking, theres very little chance of a perv lurking in your park. But however much I appeal to reason and say dont be silly, theres another internal voice that says: Madeleine McCann, Holly Wells, Jessica Chapman . . . Get real. Such people do exist, these things happen.
01
Oct
07
Mothers of prevention
Full Story:
http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0335.htm
Schoolgirls in Lancashire and Yorkshire are falling prey to sinister gangs of pimps. Two men have been sent to jail, but the girls mothers, not the police, are at the forefront of the crackdown. Why are the authorities so reluctant to get involved?
A t the crown court in Preston on August 10, a trial involving two Asian men caused unusual interest across a number of cities in the north of England. The defendants, Zulfqar Hussain and Qaiser Naveed, were each sentenced to five years and eight months for abduction, sexual activity with a child, and the supply of a controlled drug.
They had both pleaded guilty, and they were placed on the sex offenders register for life.
It seemed a shabby, seedy episode, probably typical of many cases down the years that have involved exploitative men and naive women. Yet, until these convictions, the police in over a dozen towns and cities, including Leeds, Sheffield, Blackburn and Huddersfield, had appeared reluctant to address what many local people had perceived as a growing problem the groups of men who had been preying on young, vulnerable girls and ensnaring them into prostitution.
It was a very uncomfortable scenario, not least because many of these crimes had an identifiable racial element: the gangs were Asian and the girls were white. The authorities, in the shape of politicians and the police, seemed reluctant to acknowledge this aspect of the crimes; it has been left to the mothers of the victims to speak out.
Maureens daughter Jo was one of Hussain and Naveeds victims, having been groomed by them and a number of other Asian men when she was 14. Jo went missing from her Blackburn home 90 times during the six-month period in 2005 that she was in Hussain and Naveeds clutches.
I was told by one police officer that he did not want to start a race riot by arresting Pakistani men for sexual offences, Maureen said. During the six months that Jo was in the clutches of these men, they raped, beat and abused her to the point where, says her mother, she did not even know who she was any more. Eventually, after she was attacked by Hussain and Naveed with an iron bar, Jo somehow found the courage to report them to police, and they were arrested. The case took 16 months to come to court. In the meantime, other pimps, undeterred by the impending trial, continued to go about their business.
01
Oct
07
Schools to become ‘world class’
Full Story:
http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0334.htm
Gordon Brown has again pledged to take England’s schools to the next level and make them “world class”. The PM was speaking during a national day of debate on how the government should improve children’s lives. He said celebrities needed to become role models for young people and speak out against drugs. He said: “We’ve moved our schools from being below average to being above average. We’ve now got to make them world class.” Mr Brown was addressing a citizens’ jury meeting in central London as part of the day of consultation hosted by England’s Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls, taking place in four cities. Up to 400 parents, teachers, children and social care workers are attending events in Leeds, London, Portsmouth and Birmingham – with each session linked by satellite. Role models People are being asked for their views on services as well as the roles of parents and communities and what to do to keep children safe and healthy. The government says it will use the answers to help draw up a 10-year plan for children’s services. The prime minister said good role models were crucial on issues such as drug abuse and criticised celebrities who thought they were “above the law”. He added: “I spoke to Kelly Holmes last night, the great Olympic runner, she would be very happy to be one of the role models.
Full Story:
http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0333.htm
Commenting on Laing & Buisson’s annual report, Care of Elderly People Market Survey 2007, Annie Stevenson, Senior Policy Adviser at Help the Aged said: ‘Unfortunately these latest figures are a clear indication that the social care system is about to hit the buffers, something we’ve been predicting for a long time. It’s imperative that a clear strategy is developed to ensure that the future needs in the funding of long term social care are met . ‘Once again the Laing Buisson report illustrates a concern around the funding of social care that the public just isn’t aware of. The Government must tackle the NHS and social care in conjunction with each other, maybe then public awareness of the situation will be raised. ‘Currently figures indicate a very worrying trend of a social divide in long term care – those unable to pay for their own care have the choice of good quality care eroded.’ Help the Aged is the charity fighting to free disadvantaged older people in the UK and overseas from poverty, isolation, neglect and ageism. It campaigns to raise public awareness of the issues affecting older people and to bring about policy change.
