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As I work in the social care industry, specifically with children in the system, I’m incredibly invested in the story of the 18 year old mother who left her 20 month old daughter alone in her flat for six days. It happened December of 2019 but has only just come to light.
This girl would have had her daughter when she was 16 and they lived together in a mother and baby unit. From the very brief info in the media, it’s impossible to know the mother’s background and life story which makes this more difficult.
I just had a look through her Twitter and she has been entering PLT giveaways, sharing memes and actually posted outfit photos from the week her daughter would have been starving to death in their flat. It’s quite harrowing.
A lot of people are quick to seek maximum justice and call her a sick murderer but I really think this story is much more complicated than that. There have been multiple severe system failures here.
For starters, a mother and baby unit is a supervised zone. There will be constant support available and the residents will be supervised. When this mother was witnessed leaving her flat without her baby, why did nobody stop her?
The next point is, in the unit, where residents will have been checked on often and potentially even had visits from social services...how can it be right nobody checked on her? Are they trying to say nobody heard this baby crying? For six whole days nobody heard a thing?
This is a young mother, potentially with no support. For her to leave her flat and not return for six days is worrying, even without there being a child she is responsible for. There is some serious mental health involved for her to leave a baby for a week, alone.
Of course, it’s an abhorrent scenario and it’s so easy to place the blame on the mother here. But let me tell you, the system fails people and this young mother was failed big time.
There is no denying that she made a critical mistake for which she can never escape the consequences but despite this, we simply cannot view this story as black and white. Believe me when I say there will be so many layers to this terrible situation.
There is paperwork, routines and systems in place to stop this sort of thing from happening and somewhere down the line somebody has fucked up. People slip through the net and this won’t have been an isolated incident.
I’m confident that the baby in question and potentially also her mother will have been under some kind of radar of the local authority/ social care system and somebody here has dropped the ball.
There are systems in place to prevent such catastrophic examples of neglect and these systems are not being upheld. People may think I’m reaching here but the untimely death of children in this country due to parental negligence and abuse is directly linked to a Tory government.
Our social care system is massively underfunded and incredibly saturated with children that need help. These children will never get that help when our government and worry excuse for a PM continue to drain funds from areas that are already running dry.
A very very sad story that cannot be blamed solely on the mother. What she did was inexcusable but believe me will it have been preventable.
Also just to add to this thread, are we gonna talk about the racial injustice in the care system? Yes. Would the media be spinning a different narrative if the mother and baby were white? I think so.
