How far do we accommodate different child-rearing practices? What is 'right' and what is 'wrong'?
A nurse has been jailed for three years for killing her baby by force-feeding her in the first case of its kind in Britain. She argued that she fed her child in the same that her mother fed her and her siblings in Ghana. It certainly seems highly unlikely that she intended the child harm.
The local authority's child protection responsibilities were questioned. It was noted that although the baby was taken to see doctors, she was not on the “at risk” register.
However, as noted by Dr Liz Davies, Reader in child protection, London Metropolitan University, Diamond, the baby, was born in mid-2009,more than a year after the child protection register had been abolished – so there was no register for her name to be on. After April 2008, vulnerable and abused children no longer gained the protection that was so effectively afforded by the specialist and high-status multi-agency protocol.
Davies says “Professor Eileen Munro, in her recent review of child protection, saw no need to recommend the introduction of a national “signposting” service. However, Waltham Forest Local Safeguarding Children Board, in the serious case review relating to the death of Diamond, quite rightly recommend that Munro should revisit child protection protocols and their impact on the quality of investigation and risk assessment. The return of the child protection register should have been a a clear priority of the Munro review. If Diamond’s name had been on the child protection register, professionals would have been working within a strict formal process tried and tested over many years, and this may well have saved her life.
Hopefully, that 'strict formal process' includes understanding different child-rearing practices and having the knowledge and confidence to discuss the impact on the children with the parents.
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