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No Doubt-Lessons Will Be Learned-A Very Tough Read.
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Let's start with the number of kids on some form of "at risk" register in 2024. 50,000. I'll say that again. 50,000. Any idea how many Parents will fight when faced with having their kids taken away? Pretty much all of them
A lot of the cases are incredibly complex. Let's take the case of this poor child, Sara Sharif. Because a lot of the reporting is inaccurate. Yes, that child was on a watch list from day 1. Why? Because there was a credible allegation that the child's mother tried to drown her. Which is 1 of the main reasons why the child was with her Father and Stepmother. Believing she was safer there.
We still live in a country where horror stories involving death of children is rare. Very rare. That's why it makes Headlines.
Of course damage is done when kids suffer in this way. But if you took 50,000 kids away from their parents, do you think no damage would be done to those 50,000 kids? Because the vast majority of those kids have parents who are inadequate. As opposed to evil. And it is incredibly difficult to tell which is which
We have an underfunded system. Lack of support for those struggling. Demonising underfunded and underappreciated Social Workers. Who are doing their best. Getting no credit whatsoever for the 99.9% they get right. And put in the media dock for the 0.1% that hindsight shows they got wrong.
Here is the truth. But no "inquiry" will ever say it. We can spend £Billions extra on protecting vulnerable kids. Or we can sit back. Carry on as we are. Let the odd one die. That financial choice has been made. We choose not to pay.
While blaming others.
The law must change so children who are suspected victims of abuse cannot be home educated, the Children’s Commissioner said as she called for urgent action following Sara Sharif’s brutal murder.
Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight it was “madness” that children who were at risk of abuse at home should be taken out of school, which should act as a “safeguard”.
She called for actions at a systemic level, including a unique identifier for every child and “proper data sharing” between councils and schools.
On Wednesday, Sara’s father Urfan Sharif, 42, and stepmother Beinash Batool, 30, were found guilty of her murder. Her uncle Faisal Malik, 29, who lived with them, was convicted of causing or allowing her death.
Sara, 10, was beaten to death four years after taxi driver Sharif was awarded custody, despite accusations of abuse against him, jurors heard.
Prosecutor William Emlyn Jones KC said Sharif created a “culture of violent discipline”, where assaults on Sara had “become completely routine, completely normalised”.
In January 2023, Sara had begun wearing a hijab to cover up the bruises at school.
Teachers noticed marks on her face and referred her to social services in March of that year, but the case was dropped within days.
The following month, Sara was taken out of school and the violence against her intensified in the weeks before her death.
Dame Rachel repeated a call for a home education register, which is to be included in the Government’s proposed Children’s Wellbeing Bill, in order to have “proper oversight” of children out of school.
And she said councils should be given powers to sign off on home education requests for vulnerable children.
She told the programme: “In that Children’s Wellbeing Bill, it must say that if a child is suspected of abuse, they cannot be educated at home. Being in school is a safeguard, and actually they are safer under the eyes of teachers.
“We cannot let a child who is at risk, you know, from the very people who are meant to care for her at home, go be educated at home. It’s madness.”
And Dame Rachel said it “turned my blood cold” after Sharif said “I’ve legally punished my daughter and she’s dead” in a phone call to police. She called for a clause in assault laws to be changed which allows for reasonable chastisement of children.
She raised Victoria Climbie’s death in 2000 and said it was “so remarkably similar to Sara’s”, adding “we need now to draw the line, never again, and the way to get never again is through action”.
Dame Rachel said there needed to be better data sharing between authorities so children did not “fall off their radar”.
She said: “We should not be in a situation in this country that we are in, that social care areas don’t have the data or share the data between health and education.”
David Fawcett, the great-grandfather of 16-month-old Star Hobson, who was murdered by her mother’s former partner Savannah Brockhill in 2020, told BBC Newsnight when he heard the news of Sara’s death he thought “is this going to keep on happening?”.
He said: “We thought, well, you know, when it happened with Star, social services and all this, something would get sorted out, you won’t hear of these things happening as much, but it just seems to keep on happening.
“I mean, there’s been several murders since we lost Star, when this one came up, I thought it’s children again. Just seems to be children that suffer.”
Rachael Wardell, from Surrey County Council, said that until an independent safeguarding review has concluded, a “complete picture cannot be understood or commented upon”.
The Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey, Lisa Townsend, welcomed the review, saying: “It is clear in this case that calculated attempts were made to ensure the sustained abuse of Sara happened out of plain sight.
“But there are undoubtedly questions that need answering on what could have been done to prevent her death.”
The court heard how the defendants had fled to Pakistan after Sara died at the family home in Woking, Surrey, on August 8 2023.
Sharif called police when he arrived in Islamabad and confessed he had beaten her up “too much”.
Officers went to his former home and found Sara’s broken and battered body in a bunk bed, with a confession note from Sharif on the pillow.
Sara had suffered more than 25 broken bones, from being hit repeatedly with a cricket bat, metal pole and mobile phone.
She had a broken hyoid bone in her neck from being throttled, iron burns on her buttocks, boiling water burns on her feet and human bite marks on her arm and thigh.
There was also evidence she had been bound with packaging tape and hooded during the assaults, which would have left her in excruciating pain, jurors heard.
On August 8, Sara collapsed and Batool reacted by summoning Sharif home and calling her family 30 times.
Sharif’s reaction to finding his daughter lying close to death in Batool’s lap was to “whack” her in the stomach twice with a pole for “pretending”, jurors heard.
Within hours of Sara’s death, the couple were arranging flights to Pakistan for the next day for themselves and the rest of the family.
The defendants returned to the UK on September 13 2023 – leaving behind other children who had travelled with them – and were detained within minutes of a flight touching down at Gatwick airport.
After the verdicts were returned at the Old Bailey, Sara’s mother, Olga Sharif, paid tribute to her, saying: “Sara had beautiful, brown eyes and an angelic voice. Sara’s smile could brighten up the darkest room.”
Mr Justice Cavanagh adjourned sentencing until next Tuesday.
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/sara-sharif-murder-children-risk-005033439.html
With plenty of emotion. And little or no content.
The Children's Commissioner is an ex-Head Teacher. Who clearly believes that the starting point for child safety is Teachers.
Teachers (generally) do a marvellous job. But they have little or no training in relation to child abuse. It is not their primary role, which (unsurprisingly) is to educate. It is the cheap option.
I don't mean to be rude in relation to someone who is well-intentioned. There are roughly 50,000 "at risk" and over 300,000 kids on various other Registers. Who, exactly, is to be tasked with stopping these children from being home-educated? For example, the Travellers, the people who move between countries?
If you boil it down, this is a Children's Commissioner adding an extra level of bureaucracy before home schooling can commence. Who doesn't appear to have noticed that the rise of Academies makes that next to impossible. That would be unfunded, and no doubt be carried out by the self-same people that are unable to stop this now. The Sharif case only involved home schooling in the last few months. After years of schooling had failed to stop the problem. Teachers had noticed. They notice thousands of times.
There are going to be occasional cases like this. We are going to spend £millions soul-searching. Looking for someone, anyone to blame. Instead of spending that money where it is needed-protecting children
I have not read too much about this particular case, as it is so horrific.
I dont believe schools should bear any responsibility, but they surely have a duty to report their suspicions, as they have in this case.
Data sharing is a valid point, which crops up each time a similar case occurs.
The parents were obviously cleverer than social services.
It seems she was dressed in a hijab to hide the bruises, and subsequently taken out of school to avoid further scrutiny.
It took all of 6 days for social services to complete their investigation, and drop the case.
A judge awarded custody to the father, despite accusations of abuse in respect of her siblings.
You usually make the point that you cant take them all into care.
Well in this case the child was already in care, so I suppose the question should be how did she get out.
When a similar case occurs there is always a queue of people waiting to get on the telly, to inform us of the fact that we can do better, but we dont.
I dont believe that the first time she received similar injuries, was when she was killed.
How bad does the investigation have to be in order to find nothing?
Sara had suffered more than 25 broken bones, from being hit repeatedly with a cricket bat, metal pole and mobile phone.
She had a broken hyoid bone in her neck from being throttled, iron burns on her buttocks, boiling water burns on her feet and human bite marks on her arm and thigh.
There was also evidence she had been bound with packaging tape and hooded during the assaults, which would have left her in excruciating pain, jurors heard.
RIP
More than 480 children in England died or were seriously harmed by abuse or neglect, a new report has revealed, a day after 10-year-old Sara Sharif’s father and stepmother were found guilty of her “harrowing” murder.
Data from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel revealed that 485 children were affected by serious incidents between April 1 2023 and March 31 2024.
Panel chairwoman Annie Hudson reflected on Sara’s “harrowing” case as she said the design of the child protection system must change, calling for the implementation of multi-agency children teams in every local authority.
A campaign of abuse was waged against Sara in her home, with the little girl suffering more than 70 injuries shortly before she was found dead at her house in Woking, Surrey, on August 10 last year.
She also had multiple unexplained fractures in 25 locations on her body which experts said were most likely caused by multiple episodes of blunt force trauma inflicted over several weeks.
Authorities failed to identify Sara was at risk for years.
Her father, Urfan Sharif, had repeated contact with Surrey Social Services and police, and Sara’s school made a referral to social services five months before her death but the case was closed within days.
Ms Hudson told BBC Breakfast: “I just really want to acknowledge the harrowing story about what’s happened to Sara and the trial this week, and it’s important that the perpetrators of what is just unimaginable cruelty have been brought to justice.
“It is important that, in time, there will be a forensic and robust examination of what happened and how well agencies work together and learning from that.”
Of the 330 serious incident notifications received by the panel, almost half were for children who died (46%) and more than a third involved babies under one.
More than half of incidents involving the death or serious harm of a child under five involved a parent or relevant adult with a mental health condition (57%), while 16% of children died by suicide – with 92% of the children who took their own lives recorded as having a mental health condition.
The report highlighted the need to support children with mental health needs, with more than a fifth involved in the notifications found to have a mental health condition – most of them aged between 11 and 17 but the youngest aged six.
It also called for greater measures to improve partnerships between adult and children mental health services to protect pre-school aged children whose parents suffer from poor mental health.
According to the data, 43% of incidents featured a parent with an addiction to, or who misuses, alcohol and/or drugs.
Almost a quarter of serious incidents occurred outside the home by people who were not a member of the child’s family, including gang violence, child sexual abuse and child criminal exploitation.
On the most important issue identified from the report, Ms Hudson told BBC Breakfast: “Too often there are breakdowns in communication and the way in which information about what’s happening in a child’s life is not shared and put together in terms of the pieces of a jigsaw and understanding what’s happened in terms of the history of the life of a child or a family.”
She said agencies involved in child protection are often working in their own “silos and parameters” and highlighted the need for teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers, police and other professionals to share information to understand what is happening in a child’s life.
The panel is calling on the Government to implement multi-agency children teams in every local authority, creating “one single team or point” where child protection concerns will be investigated.
Maria Neophytou, interim chief executive at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, called on the Government to ensure family support services were more accessible and affordable.
“It is always deeply disturbing to see how many children have died or been seriously harmed as a consequence of abuse and neglect in the last year,” she said.
“This report acts as a powerful reminder of the tragic consequences when children’s best interests are not placed at the heart of the decisions that directly affect them, whether by frontline safeguarding partners in health, children’s social care or policing, or by Government officials and policymakers.”
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/more-480-children-died-seriously-084613036.html
But-whenever you get serious subjects, you get politics. Not necessarily party politics. Just good old-fashioned empire building.
You might read the headlines of that report, and reach 2 immediate conclusions-
1. 480 kids died as a result of this sort of thing; and
2. There is no joined-up thinking
Neither are true. Thank goodness.
Let's look at that "480" number. Sounds terrible-until you look at the definitions.
(1) It is "death or serious harm". And "serious harm" is not defined
(2) "Abuse" and "neglect" have different meanings, too. Child stabbed due to a bit of gang warfare, or at school? That is "abuse". It doesn't have to be family-related. "Neglect"? If a child takes their own life while mentally unwell, and Parents did not understand how serious the situation was, that counts as "neglect".
It might surprise you to learn that local authorities already have to report all cases of suspected serious incident abuse to 1 body. And all cases of child death, regardless of whether abuse or neglect is suspected.
The Organisation that gets all this information? That would be the Panel chaired by Annie Hudson. Busy. Pointing fingers elsewhere.
Multi-disciplinary teams only work if they are properly funded and report to a decision-maker.
Not a record-keeper.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/care-boss-who-failed-to-protect-sara-sharif-handed-obe/ar-AA1vKoZw?ocid=msedgntp&pc=NMTS&cvid=3bddc806e4384a0d9c597f5e24f950c1&ei=116#fullscreen
On the second day of Sharif’s evidence there was a dramatic moment. Voice raised and emotional, Sharif pointed towards his wife in the dock and called her a “psycho” and “evil”.
But it was under forensic cross-examination by his wife’s barrister that Sharif finally cracked.
Caroline Carberry KC dredged up his past, the previous partners he had allegedly threatened to kill and the arrests for false imprisonment for which he had never been charged.
It was the seventh day of his evidence when everything changed.
Sharif was being questioned about missing the birth of one of his children. He started trying to interrupt her, while she persisted in trying to get him to answer the questions.
Eventually he managed to get it out. “I want to say something.”
“I admit what I said in my phone call and my written note, every single word.”
There was a pause as everyone took in what he had just said.
Then Ms Carberry KC ran with it, grabbing a copy of the note that he had left by his daughter’s body. She started to go through it line by line.
“Did you kill your daughter by beating?" “Yes,” he replied. “She died because of me.”
“It was you who inflicted those injuries on her wasn’t it?” “Yes,” he said.
“Do you accept causing the fractures?” “Yes ma’am.” “Did you use the cricket bat?” “Yes ma’am.” “Did you use the white metal pole?” “Yes ma’am.”
Surprise turned to shock and shock turned to horror, as he agreed to more and more cruel acts. Some jurors sat open-mouthed.
“I take full responsibility for everything,” he said.
He was shaking and crying. Batool was sobbing in the dock.
Even Sharif’s barrister was taken by complete surprise. “I had absolutely no idea he was going to do that. You can imagine my reaction when it did happen?” he would later tell the jury.
Eventually Batool ran out of court sobbing and the hearing was suspended. Some jurors were later seen in tears.
Sharif continued to deny causing the burn and bite marks on Sara.
Ms Carberry KC asked Sharif if he wanted to have the charge of murder put to him again.
“Yes ma’am,” he said, before his barrister intervened and asked to speak to him.
When the court reconvened Sharif said he did not accept he was guilty of murder. “I didn’t intend to kill her,” he said.
Sharif spent nine days in the witness box. We will never know what made him crack in the end. The pressure of having to keep up with his extensive lies? Or the realisation that there was no way out?
The jury never got to hear from Sara's stepmother. Batool declined to give evidence. So we never heard her explain why she refused to provide dental impressions for comparisons to the bite marks found on Sara. Sharif and Malik had both been ruled out as a match.
We will also never know who caused the iron burn to Sara's bottom. Sharif insisted it was not him.
One day the prosecutor suggested it would have taken two people to hold Sara down and burn her. "Who was it?" he asked.
"I don't know Sir, must have been kids?" Sharif replied. "How low will you stoop?" replied the prosecutor.
What we do know is that Batool knew for at least two years that her husband was beating Sara.
The horror that had been felt for weeks in the courtroom quietly turned into a deep sadness for Sara - the confident, chatty and caring 10-year-old girl who had big dreams of becoming a ballet dancer.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6241k940n2o
The UK Tonight with Matt Barbet | "Questions to be answered" over Sara Sharif murder, says Starmer
Moves to appeal after court upholds ban on naming judges who presided over Sara Sharif hearings
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/moves-to-appeal-after-court-upholds-ban-on-naming-judges-who-presided-over-sara-sharif-hearings/ar-AA1vRHCN?ocid=msedgntp&pc=NMTS&cvid=985f0a49d63e4fdf910828049831fb1d&ei=62#fullscreen
The council that failed Sara Sharif placed another young girl in the care of an accused paedophile who allegedly went on to abuse her.
Three years before Sara’s murder, Surrey county council was reprimanded for placing a seven-year-old girl with a member of her extended family despite him being previously charged with sex abuse of a minor.
In a review, the authority was found to have ignored repeated warnings about the man when it handed the girl over to his care. She later alleged sexual abuse against him and was moved to a new foster placement.
The case further highlights the weaknesses in Surrey’s social services, which missed multiple opportunities to save Sara from her abusive father Urfan Sharif.
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/council-failed-sara-sharif-placed-133707021.html