Expectations of child services

[fez]

Bronson Battersby: Review after boy, two, and dad found dead

The deaths of Bronson Battersby and his dad Kenneth prompt a "rapid review" by Lincolnshire Council.

www.bbc.co.uk

I was reading this earlier today and it broke my heart to think about the poor little boy alone, starving to death with his dead dad in the house with him.

No doubt child services will be hauled over the coals for this but I always question what we can do to avoid things like this. We have the idea that being with biological parents is the best place for children until they are truly horrifically neglectful. Adoption is a very hard process to go through for good parents and yet we have such a low bar for leaving children with the scumbags who neglect and abuse them. This was a tragic case but the mum didn't even care enough to realise her baby was dead for well over a week. There was no support network within that family that was checking in.

Child services are already stretched and dealing with horrible cases where they must know constantly that they are trying to do the impossible and protect children from the very people who should love them the most.

I don't know why but this particular case really got to me. Perhaps because I have a couple of 9 month old boys so whenever something like this comes up it just makes me wonder how anyone can be so cruel and callous as to neglect a child so much.

How do we have a system that both tries to keep children with their ****** parents but also knows when to take them away?

 

[fez]

Do you know something we don't? How do we know the mother wasn't dead/in prison etc?

Are there other articles that explain this or have you assumed?

None of the various articles I have read on this have suggested anything other than a mother who simply didn't care that she hadn't heard anything about her 2 year old for days. Most semi-reasonable parents would be climbing up the walls if they didn't hear from their 2 year olds care giver for a few days. Let alone a few weeks.

I'm sure more information will come out about this as the tabloids dig into it.

 

[fez]

To those saying about people dying alone in their homes, thats obviously sad but very hard to avoid. You can get panic alarms however if you need that sort of thing. Even then that won't save everyone. This is a much more tragic case of a child having so little support and love around them that they went for over a week before they were found. I can't can't imagine how horrible that little boys last few days must have been.

 

[fez]

This could have happened to any single parent, I don't think the social services or police element is at all relevant here. Social services can't monitor every single parent in the country to make sure they are still alive every day.

It's different for different family structures of course but for me 3 days of radio silence is nothing. When you have shared custody of your kids the last thing you want to do is be checking in with your ex every day.

How old are your kids, does your partner have serious health issues and no support network around her that would pick up on any issues?

If this was even a 4-5 year old they would almost certainly have been fine and able to raise the alarm. This was a 2 year old. The mum didn't, by all accounts check on the boy for weeks. Nothing about this is normal or OK for any parent that loves and cares for their children.

 

[fez]

You'd think the mother is only lashing out at social services as she feels guilt about her actions at the time but I don't think she's the type to blame herself.

Its ****** parent 101. Blame everyone else for the fact you're an awful parent who shouldn't have had children in the first place.