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

Neglect and Serious Case Reviews
professional responses
All seven young people had experienced multiple types of maltreatment, multiple losses,
separation and feelings of abandonment. For most there was evidence of unresolved
issues about this abandonment – with one young person always seeking out his mother
and wanting to be reunited but experiencing repeated bouts of rejection. Most had
limited sources of support and were isolated. There was little evidence in the reviews
that practitioners working with these young people knew their early history and took it
into account to understand their development and their behaviour as an adolescent.
Many of the older young people, like Frazer, had long histories of involvement with
a number of agencies (especially children’s social care [CSC], child and adolescent
mental health services [CAMHS] and youth offending teams [YOTs]). Serious professional
concerns about neglect and its impact on the child’s emotional health were
often apparent from when the child was very young or were picked up when the child
first started school. An example of this is when a teacher spoke of, ‘an angry, frightened
little boy who would wait at school for his mother, but she would often not come, be late
or be under the influence of alcohol or drugs.’
Athough some young people had been the subject of neglect child protection plans
over long periods and were in and out of care, it was also possible for some to do well
(intermittently) at school and perhaps to have an excellent attendance record. School
could be a place of safety that young people might try to return to even when they were
excluded from school. There could be good engagement between the young people and
both school staff and CAMHS workers, ‘the CAMHS worker was in frequent and regular
touch for the subsequent three years, developing a strong therapeutic relationship
despite X’s reputation for being difficult to engage.’
Carers were not adequately supported to cope with one young person’s behaviour
especially when he became ‘threatening and dangerous’ leading to another rejection.
Children’s social care closed the case at this point of heightened need, when the young
person was aged 14 ‘allowing’ him to live with family friends. Serious offending led to
custody but at the point of discharge from custody, children’s social care still maintained
the decision that he was ‘No longer a priority’ for a service and would not have received
support had he lived long enough to be discharged. The consequences of a ‘wait and see’
approach (Gardner 2008) are as damaging and dangerous to young people of this age as
they are with much younger children.
lack of support in the transition to adulthood
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There was evidence of young people asking children’s social care to be accommodated,
in one instance because at the age of 16 the young person could no longer tolerate his
mother’s alcohol abuse and lack of food and care at home. Such requests for help from
older young people tended to be refused by children’s services who thought these were
lower level cases more appropriate to be referred for support to other agencies. At the
age of sixteen many vulnerable young people lose the protection offered by school and
struggle to find any other protected routes to adulthood, and no routes out of a neglectful