Who is to blame ?

When a child dies at the hands of it's parents, who is to blame ?

I ask after two recent cases in the press. One where a father beat his seven week old daughter to death. One , locally where a couple starved their 11 month oldd daughter to death .

In both cases the press are pointing the finger of blame towrds social services and the health visitors. Why ? In neither case was the child judged to be in any danger. In the first case the baby was only 7 weeks old, she had been fed, and cared for up until the point the father took it in to his head to inflict a terrible assault on her. Even his own wife had no inkling, so how on earth was anyone else supposed to know what he was capable of ?

In the second case, its a lot closer to home, matter of a few miles. The child , a little girl called Kimberley , was the 4th child. Her three elder siblings were well cared for, there had been no reports of any thing untoward before, and the health visitor saw the family up until she was 4 months old. At that satge everything was fine, she was healthy, gaining weight, developing as any normal child would. But from that point onwards the family avoided all contact with the health visitor. Now, in hindsight, its easy to sit back and say ' oh well she should have known something was wrong' but why should she have suspected ? The family had an impeccable record, the older kids were at school and nursery and no concerns were raised about them, so why would it be 'obvious' that there was something terribly wrong with the 4th child ?

Garin is my 4th , and we rarely see our HV, but she doesn't worry, she has no reason to be worried, she knows that after all the kids we have had , we know what we are doing. Only she doesn't 'know' really. She has no reason though to think otherwise.

Stop blaming the social workers, the health visitors, the family GP , old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.... blame the people who commited these horrendous crimes.

I think what riled me most, was a comment from a 'neighbour' of Kimber;eys family, who claimed she 'knew' something was wrong. My question to her, if you KNEW something was wrong, what did you do ? Oh yes thats right, sweet F.A. If you 'knew' something was wrong why did you not ring the social services? Because you are either talking shite and just wanted your two minutes of glory in the newspapers, or you couldn't be arsed to ring. Either way , its not somethig to be proud of.


RIP Kimberley, may you now be happy, warm, free from fear, hunger, and pain. Play with the angels poppet xxxxx