Child Protection - Why Are We Failing?

The catalogue of failures, across the UK, when it comes to our ability to protect children in danger is truly appalling. Already this year there have been convictions in the cases of Baby P and now of little Brandon Muir - both killed by people known to authorities as both dangerous and potentially deadly.

Police, social work, health service and to some extent education service personnel must all look at themselves. Yet again no one is prepared to take personal responsibility and do the decent thing by resigning for having failed 23 month old Brandon. This poor child lived with a drug addict, prostitute mother who brought a man into her life who was known by authorities to be violent and a potential danger to her child.

Post a conviction we find out, yet again, that authorities were just moments away from taking a child who died into care. TOO LATE! Why oh why do we always hear what they might have done instead of hearing about early intervention to protect children who are being physically abused.

Statistics released today suggest that as many as 50,000 Scottish children are living with drug addict parents. Given the risk to them of their parent being unable to look after them, or indeed of accidentally taking drugs left lying about, it is surely time for state intervention on an unprecedented scale to protect these children.

Our continual inability to get this right is a stain on the reputation of our society and something we must address. There are thousands of possibilities out there for placement of children in need of proper homes. Foster care, adoption, care homes take your pick, all would be better than leaving children at risk in the way we continue to do.

I don't know why I was adopted just after birth but I am very grateful that I was placed with a loving, caring mother and father who would have given anything to protect me from harm. Where parents are not able to do this for their children it is the states role to step in and for as long as the state fails to do so effectively we should all hang our heads in shame.

Some Things Just Make You Angry!

My work with the Campaign Against Political Correctness (www.capc.co.uk) ensures that journalists phone up with a wide variety of enquiries on subjects ranging from the bizarre to the ridiculous.

Sometimes I get a right good laugh out of the stories I am asked to comment on - (re-branding 'Librarians' as 'Audience Development Officers') - and sometimes the things the things I am told simply annoy me - (banning of the word 'husband' in maternity wards in case it offends the unmarried).

But today, I have to say, I was simply annoyed when asked to comment on Edinburgh City Council's decision to remove two children from the custody of their grandparents in order to enable a gay couple to adopt them.

Surely no one in their right mind thinks it is the best interest of these children to be torn from their biological family in order to be brought up in an environment where they will be under constant scrutiny because of the relationship of their guardians?

Edinburgh City Council even took the grandparents to court to remove their rights to care for them, placing them into foster care while the legal action took place over the past two years. These poor people eventually had to give up their legal fight because of rising costs, which is hardly surprising given the Council's seemingly endless resource.

Social workers have now placed the brother and sister with a gay couple and the grandparents claim they have been warned they risk never seeing the youngsters again if they continue with their opposition to the same-sex adoption.

As an adopted child myself, it offends me greatly to see a system that benefited me so greatly abused by a local authority in the name of political correctness and probably achievement of a target. It is surely now time for every politicians to do everything they can to protect the family in recognition of it being the heart of good society.

Children are the most precious gift our society are given and it is our duty to protect them as best we can not to pursue a politically correct agenda!

Our Shame!

The debacle that is trying to get Gary Glitter back to the UK and under strict control is rapidly becoming a stain on our countries good name throughout the world.

Glitter apparently wants to come back to the UK because he wants free treatment from our National Health Service for a heart condition, but he doesn't want to enter the country on our terms - preferring instead to seek to enter at his leisure. Our Home Secretary also apparently wants him back in the country to show us all her Government is capable of controlling people with vile personal preferences.

Around the world people must be asking why the British government was not able to plan getting Glitter back to the UK on his release from prison. It isn't as if we didn't know where he was for the past 3 years, (jail), and it isn't as if we couldn't have asked the Vietnamese government to give us a bit of advanced warning of his release to ensure we assisted them to deport this criminal from their land.

On his return to the country you would also have thought our Government would have made provision to force him into the maximum level of supervision possible under our law. Unfortunately this foresight does not exist in British government. Apparently Glitter has not posed a threat to children within the past 6 months because he has been in jail and as a result we cannot put him into the highest category of sex offender management. Instead he will simply be put onto the sex offenders register and will have to abide by standard offender management arrangements.

As I always say, if something is foreseeable it is avoidable. Gary Glitter should have been brought straight back to the UK and any loophole that enables him to avoid proper management of him in this country should have been closed. Our children deserve proper protection from this vile man and anything less than our best endeavours to ensure this is simply not good enough!