Neglect and serious case reviews (PDF, 735KB) - nspcc

Neglect and Serious Case Reviews
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what it was like to be a child in this family:
agency involvement:
Clues about Evie’s experience as a baby at home come from details about
her older sibling’s behaviour. The older sibling’s charm and compliance at
school coupled with reticent, anxious behaviour suggest that home could
be a frightening place where it’s safer to placate your parent(s) than to risk
provoking their anger. It’s safer to behave this way at school too, because
you never know when people might turn on you. When your clothes are
uncomfortable, when you feel cold and you don’t have enough to eat it’s
hard to concentrate at school. It’s also easy to be bullied because you are
always the one who is different and new, and so you stand out.
Evie would probably have been in the process of learning (unconsciously)
that her crying to be fed or comforted, or any sign of need, made her mother
shout and become angry. She would have been intuiting, like her sister, that
she increased her chances of being cared for and staying safe by smiling
and being an ‘easy’ baby – but this would not have always succeeded
in getting her father to notice and attend to her. In order to survive she
needed to be fed and to signal hunger and the need to be fed to her carers
– as such she did not have the option of keeping quiet, nor could she be
emotionally self-contained. Cries for nurture risk assault – especially when in
these circumstances, parents are fraught and anxious in a new environment
with no support systems and the demands of a new baby.
Children’s social care became involved because the school were concerned
about the sibling’s behaviour at school and were concerned she might be
suffering emotional neglect. Evie was a few weeks old at the time. Concerns
about physical and emotional neglect were not felt to cross the threshold to
tip the case into child protection and the family were worked with, minimally,
as a child in need case. By the time the parents’ offences of violence became
known, professionals had already formed a view that this was a low level
neglect case and that the key concerns were about emotional and physical
neglect in relation to the older child. During the assessment period there
had been one medical examination of Evie’s sibling to follow up an injury to
her arm but no clear evidence of non-accidental injury was found and the
explanation for the injury was accepted as plausible.
Although the parental engagement with most agencies was hostile, there
was sufficient contact between the father and the school to indicate a
satisfactory level of compliance and to sufficiently allay concerns. There
was no multi-agency response to the family’s refusal to accept any health
services or to their refusal of any help for parenting difficulties. The lack of a
multi-agency response was largely due to the mother’s hostility and refusal
to engage with services.