Better Safe Than Sorry

This is a story out of the U.K. documenting the hysteria in child protective services after the death of Baby P.  You will have to do a search on the term "Baby P" on Legally Kidnapped to find the articles.  Baby LK has informed me that there are more than 300 stories on this.

Basically, this is what happened:

In 2003, Victoria Climbie was murdered in foster care.

In 2003, Lord Laming published findings with recommendations on the murder.

Lord Laming Report on the Murder of Victoria Climbie 2003

In 2007, Baby P was murdered.

In 2008, Lord Laming's recommendations were implemented.

In March 2009, annual review was made on the implementations.

Laming One Year on March 2010

As a result of the events, there has been mass hysteria in the U.K. leading to exponentially increase in the rates of removal.  No wonder why U.S. children are not receiving required preventive screening.  You might have your kid snatched!

Better safe than sorry, as Reno would say.

Baby P child abuse guidelines patronising to doctors — and dangerous
Camilla Cavendish: commentary

Doctors exercise their professional judgment every day. That is what we pay them for. There are very few doctors who, on finding a cigarette burn or an adult bite mark on a child, would not conduct a complete examination and, if necessary, contact social services. Those are classic signs of child abuse that have become, for tragic reasons, all too well known to the professionals.

To imply that doctors need new guidelines, which virtually order them to contact social services if they are in any doubt about a child, seems a little patronising. It is also dangerous. It reads like an exercise in back-covering that will encourage the over-reporting of everything from frequent crying to harmless bruises.

Several parents have told me that they have not taken their child to A&E because they were afraid a doctor might get the wrong idea and contact social services. One was a single father whose four-year-old tearaway was for ever falling over in the playground.

Another couple — lawyers — have a seven-year-old boy who had a painful penis. His mother asked her husband to turn the car around half way to hospital, because, she told me, she feared “the way the wind was blowing”.

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I also know several women who have not sought help for post-natal depression because they, rightly or wrongly, were afraid that their doctor or health visitor might “report” them.

It is a terrible state of affairs when people start to see doctors as part of a hostile state apparatus rather than as trusted and caring professionals.

The irony is that the less trusted they are, the less authority they will wield over the parents whose children do desperately need protection — particularly when they are being told to detain children in hospital.

The guidance seems to have been sparked by the failure to save the life of Baby P, whose mother tried to cover up the extent of his horrific injuries. That he was already on the at-risk register makes it even more extraordinary that a paediatrician did not properly examine him.

Victoria Climbié, who died seven years earlier, was also on the at-risk register and was seen by several health workers, all of whom seem to have assumed that someone else — usually social services — was taking responsibility for recording her injuries and taking action. The answer must surely be to ensure that children on the at-risk register are examined regularly. That does not require a giant, counter-productive bureaucracy.

The BMA guidance fits a familiar pattern of encouraging public servants to generate “information” on which other agencies will feel they must act. This may stay on file despite all attempts by an innocent family to remove it.

One result is that overworked social workers are deluged in still more pieces of paper. Another is that doctors whose primary job is to treat patients will have been co-opted into a system which routinely breaks the age-old principle of patient confidentiality — apparently without a murmur of protest.

Most Medicaid Children in Nine States Are Not Receiving All Required Preventive Screening 2010