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Nick Clegg re Daniel Pelka - Community Guilt & Responsibility

5 replies

evie190 · 01/08/2013 20:12

It's perfectly true that we ALL have a responsibility to care and look out
for children in the community -
Too many parents use them as hostages to obtain material goods and allowances that don't get spent on the child

There should be a collective guilt in relation to this little boy's death -
I find it totally unbelievable that so many could have turned their face
away and pretended not to notice -
It's totally SHOCKING -
What is the matter with everyone?
In France it's a criminal offence to stand by and not call for or offer assistance
My neighbours actually complained about the noise that my beating up made - can you imagine that?

Sometime later my outside light was on and my front door open and a woman and her children were stood at my door -
She said she was trying to escape an abusive husband
I drove her to a town where some of her family lived.
It was the least I could do.
Other countries such as Malta people watch out for each other - in this country you could be lying in your house dead for weeks or in the gutter and people step over you!
People seemed to have become anaesthetised to feeling for others -
Alice Miller a world renowned writer/ former psychotherapist and of whom writer Edna O'Brien wrote "Every Parent Should Read Her" -
opened the prison gates for me - it is still taboo to doubt a mother's behaviour - I've experienced and lived with the lies and blaming from a munchausen by proxy, narcissistic mother - lists drawn up to take back to "school" of supposed misdemeanours" when in fact the whole time I was desperately trying to escape her -
Ian Hislop is patron or Chairman of charity "Railway Children" kids who
hang around railway stations wanting to be saved -I used to hang around the bars in the main railway stations in London - My mother was rich -but little or nothing was spent on me - lists were sent to the family trustees to reclaim her bills - I discovered one letter from the trust manager stating "There as some things that ALL parents normally pay for the children!"
Hers was a highly creative embezzlement - an "education" paid for by the trustees - which was nothing more than lessons in surviving the unacceptable - while she was getting her own therapy FOC! While labelling her child "maladjusted"
In fact those running the place were the maladjusted - one boy who reported his abuse was expelled and later climbed halfway down a cliff in Hastings overdosed and took two days to die
His brother continues to complain on the old ex pupil's school Horncastle Wordpress Discussion Group -website - there are those - one of whom I was horrified to discover an ex pupil returned as a teacher
it was the boy who killed himself, and his brother who stated this creature inflicted a slippering/shoeing so hard it drew blood -
I am convinced this same man could well have continued elsewhere and still not caught. It isn't good enough to sweep unsavoury matters under the carpet and unfortunately there are secret societies and clubs harbouring those who should be brought to justice-
The man who shot all those children at Dunblane was not supposed to have been granted a gun license but Charles ? whatever his name one of our European parliamentarians
wrote a glowing report praising him for all his boys' clubs!!!
High ranking statesmen were involved and it was hushed up and the Dunblane issue was buried -This is what we are fighting everyday
I was treated to the chemical cosh and that shut me up alright with defamatory comments lodged in my notes for trying to complain to one quack about an abusive quack in childhood - and they escaped
How I wish I'd had a mother like Doreen Lawrence!-

OP posts:
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Dahlen · 02/08/2013 12:32

I don't think it's as simple as all that TBH, though I agree completely with the sentiment that "it takes a village to raise a child."

This all centres on community IMO and I bet if someone were to do a study on the prevalence of child abuse in connection to community cohesion, you'd find that abuse is much more rife in areas where there is a high turnover of residents. In areas where people know each other well and have done for years, I think it would be less. The Children's Society report conducted a few years ago showed that the incidence of child abuse correlates strongly with the number of adults closely involved in a child's life, the supposition being that they act as a form of checks and balances on each other.

The trouble is our modern lifestyle encourages frequent relocation. Whether that's working people moving to find work, or people on benefits moving to avoid falling foul of the bedroom tax. At the same time, we live in a culture rapidly following in the footsteps of America where everything is a potential case for litigation. People don't want to get involved in case they either get sued or end up on the receiving end of some pretty nasty behaviour that just gets ignored because it falls under the bracket of antisocial behaviour that councils and the police are really pretty powerless to do much about.

None of that should be an excuse, but without a connection to the people around you it is so very easy to convince yourself that what you saw was nothing worth worrying about.

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zatyaballerina · 07/08/2013 18:15

People are responsible for their own behaviour and need to be held fully accountable for it. Social services failed Daniel Pelka but ultimately it was the mother and stepfather who tortured him do death. I don't know how that's the fault of "the community", the community didn't raise his mother and stepfather to be the psychopaths they are, outside of the school (who reported them to ss) I doubt many people in the community even knew who they were.

The problem is that they were repeatedly reported yet all the so called 'professionals' believed his mothers lies. How could they (school and doctors) be stupid enough to believe that a child who was so hungry that he looked like a famine victim and searched in the rubbish for food had an 'eating disorder' and they shouldn't feed himShock How could they not put that together with his multiple bruises and realise that something was going on. Did nobody even talk to the poor child? The problem lies with those who were paid to protect him and failed to do so. There was nothing that anybody in the community could have legally done other than report what they saw (and those who saw did).

What your suggesting is very different, you're suggesting that we all get involved in our neighbours business and become their keeper. I have no intention of being my neighbours keeper, I have no interest in their lives, if they fuck up and make bad relationship choices I have no intention of intervening and suffering for it, their bad choices are theirs to deal with and learn from, I don't care. It's one thing (and the right thing) to report child/elder/disabled abuse to the authorities but getting involved in other peoples domestic dramas is not just incredibly boring, it's downright dangerous.

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BoneyBackJefferson · 08/08/2013 12:13

zatyaballerina

"The problem is that they were repeatedly reported yet all the so called 'professionals' believed his mothers lies."

they didn't that is why they repeatedly reported.

"How could they (school and doctors) be stupid enough to believe that a child who was so hungry that he looked like a famine victim and searched in the rubbish for food had an 'eating disorder' and they shouldn't feed him"

They repeatedly reported.

"How could they not put that together with his multiple bruises and realise that something was going on."

They repeatedly reported.

"The problem lies with those who were paid to protect him and failed to do so."

They repeatedly reported.

"Did nobody even talk to the poor child?"

How do you know that they didn't? Do you know how the professionals are to ask questions?

I'm not saying that there are not problems with the system but those at on the front line of this did their jobs.

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Paula0506 · 03/09/2013 19:52

Almost 12,000 people - including three MPs - have now signed this petition for Daniel's Law; to make it the law for those working in regulated activities (e.g. schools) to report suspicions of child abuse.

The objective is to support and require people to come to the aid of children in distress by reporting to the Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO) or to the police; a legal obligation will remove any doubt or hesitation, fear of recrimination or reprisal.

Daniel Pelka's serious case review will report mid-September and we hope it will be bold enough to make some 'radical proposals for improvement' (Geoffrey Robinson, MP for Coventry North West). Whatever the recommendations of the report, government and support agencies agree that something is not working. The five charities represented by Mandate Now are convinced that the introduction of mandatory reporting in regulated activities will spearhead the overhaul we so badly need in our approach to child protection.

Many other countries have such laws - Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden and the USA to name but a few. Why not the UK?

Please read and, if you agree, sign via the link below.

www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/change-the-law-to-better-protect-vulnerable-children-like-daniel-pelka

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Tanith · 04/09/2013 23:08

Didn't you read Boney's post?

"THEY REPEATEDLY REPORTED"

How does this petition address the failings in this case when it wasn't the school that failed him?

I wish I could say that it is unusual. Sadly, it's not. In the Victoria Climbie and the Baby P cases, concerns were raised. There are school staff up and down the country banging their heads in frustration as they report serious concerns and NOTHING happens.

It's not the front line that needs even more regulation - it's the authority to whom they report their concerns that needs reform and the funds to deal adequately with all cases of children in distress.

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