Baby P
Peter Connelly, also known as Baby P, was a 17 month old boy. He suffered more than 50 injuries from his mother and her boyfriend over an eight month period before he died. His mother, Tracey Connelly had taken him to Haringey Children’s services and NHS health professionals several times with bruises and seen my social workers more than 60 times but Baby P was still released back into her care. She would cover the baby’s face with chocolate to cover up his bruises. Baby P’s devastating death should have been prevented and if the right actions were performed, the situation could have been stopped. Peter’s GP have been criticised for failing to raise concerns when the doctor found bruises on his chest and head. Baby P died in Haringey which is the same borough where the child abuse victim Victoria Climbie had also died and this raised major concerns of child protection procedures in England. After this horrible incident, Working Together to Safeguard was strengthened and the government set up the Social Work Reform Board and the Social Work Taskforce because it was believed that there was a failure of practice rather than policy.
Victoria Climbie
Case study: Murder of Victoria Climbe
The death of Victoria Climbe has become one of many horrendous child abuse cases today in Britain today. Victoria Climbe was born in the Ivory Coast in November 1991, she moved to France with her great-aunt Marie country in hope of a better education. They sooner arrived in London in April 1999, once settled in London Victoria began to experience tragic forms of neglect by her great aunt Marie and partner Carl Manning.
Physical and sexual abuse
Victoria had experience tragic forms of abuse which social services failed to she was physically and sexually abused daily by Marie Kouao and Carl Manning, during the abuse she beaten with number of entities these were bike chains, hammers and wires. She also suffered from cigarette burns and left tied up for long period of time the partner of Marie Kouao was sexually abusive towards Victoria.
Injuries
Victoria suffered a total of 128 injuries that social services failed to identify. The injuries Victoria had suffered from led up to her death, she died on the 25th February 2000 aged eight. Since the sad death of Victoria, the Victoria Climbié Foundation UK was founded from the Victoria Climbié Family Campaign which has urged the protection and wellbeing of children suffering child abuse.
The image shows the injury on Victoria Climbie's body.
(picture taken from BBC news. Available at: https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2062590.stm )
Lauren Calhoun - The Girl in the Closet
In the UK people do not name children that have been abused that have survived in the news or media till they are older and make the choice of coming forward themselves. Some people might never be able to talk about what happened in their childhood as it is something that might have hurt them deeply and scarred them for the rest of their lives. Therefore this story is on a girl from the U.S. – Lauren Calhoun – that was closed into a closet from the age of 2 till the age of 8, when the police found her. This girl have been through some of the worst abuse, by any mother or stepfather, she was locked in a closet for 6 years. They starved her, she was constantly naked, full of lice and all around here, there was human waste. She was so badly starved that she had to eat her waste or sneak food in when she was finally allowed to eat. When she was allowed out of the closet was when she got another punishment, such as having to stay under their house till her parents said it was ok for her to come back in or her parents putting her in a toy box if they were traveling anywhere. They would always keep the radio on so that her siblings would not be able to hear her or people visiting them, which is why the police did not notice it earlier. Her stepfather is the one who finally had enough and broke down and said to the neighbours “Barbie has a little secret” (which was a reference to her mother, Barbara).
(Photos available on: https://drphil.com/slideshows/slideshow/6725/?id=6725&slide=1&showID=1785&preview=&versionID=)
