Sentencing, Social Reviews and My Own Recovery

by Hayley
(Solihull)

Since my last post, the trial of Angela Gordon and Abu Junaid Hamza has reached it's finale. The evil duo have been sentenced to a measly 15 years imprisonment.

It is since then that Birmingham Social Services, the section that deals with children's services are having a review. In the mean time, how many children are going to be harmed by abusive parents? How many social workers will be barred from entering a home where abuse is suspected, accepting the parent's explanation/excuse that their child is accident prone? Why has it taken so many children dying as a result of abuse for any reforms to be proposed in childrens services? Peter, Toni, Khyra and Victoria have all been let down by an already bogged down system that wouldn't save many kids even if it wasn't so badly understaffed. In thursdays edition of my local news there was a feature on the work of a social worker in children's services. the person featured remembered a case of a little girl who had clung to her hands, desperately pleading to go away, to not have to stay there.

One idea which for many children or abuse survivors including myself has come too late, interview children on their own, without their parents present. How I wish I had been taken somewhere else to say what I wanted to happen when my social worker visited my childhood home, the place where I should have been safe but my brother took away that right. I often wonder, would things have been different, or would my life have taken a different path?

During the years of abuse I developed some poor ways of dealing with it, getting in with a bad crowd at high school and being too submissive to reject the somewhat peurile ethos of the kids. Even now as I am in my 30's I am still all too submissive and take any amount of rubbish and abuse thrown at me. During a night shift at work one night I got talking to a colleague, one of few I can really properly trust. when he put it too me that I need to toughen up, I looked at him completely stunned. Me toughen up? I protested that I can't, too scared of being labelled rude and abusive, I don't know how to be assertive. He immediately thought that I don't want to be assertive. He could find himeslef rather surprised next time we work together on a night duty, when another nurse starts acting juvenile. I have the odd lapse, just for the record I had had a nasty crack on the head and was feeling terrible, but I'm slowly getting there. there'll be the porky pig impressions, the idiots who will just laugh in my face. Those will be all the more worth it when I can stand up for myself effectively and not feel scared or shocked that I did such a dastardly thing!