Again the State has been found wanting in caring for children, writes Shane Dunphy
Daniel Talbot, the subject of a report published recently by the Child and Family Agency, lived his life in a desperate lurch from one moment to the next, begging for help from anyone who would listen. The son of an intellectually disabled mother and an alcoholic, uncaring father, the first decade of his life was one of abuse and neglect. His years spent in care seem to have been hardly any better.
I had the chance to meet Daniel’s aunts, Donna and Debbie, when I was invited to appear with them on TV3’s Tonight with Vincent Brown.
I was humbled by these two women who have put their lives on hold to fight for recognition for the nephew they tried so hard to save. Donna fostered Daniel for more than a year, ringing the HSE up to 23 times a day in an attempt to secure the psychotherapy she believed would help him overcome the traumas of his nightmarish early childhood. That her dedication yielded no benefits for the boy speaks volumes about the kind of attention children within the care system can expect.
Daniel spent, in all, nine years being moved from foster homes to residential settings and finally to out-of-hours hostels and B&Bs. It was in these so-called ‘emergency placements’ (basically holding centres for the homeless) that he encountered the drugs that were to be his final undoing.
In 2010, at just 19 years old, Daniel died of an overdose.
He had just been released from prison and was without a social worker despite, just before his release, having openly sought help and support from the HSE, the agency that had effectively raised him.
Shortcomings
On July 15 the Child and Family Agency published reports on Daniel and four other children who all died while in care. The findings of these documents all highlight the same shortcomings, which also mirror a report published only two years ago by the HSE on 196 deaths in care over the previous decade.
All these studies make for depressing reading, couched as they are in jarring self-congratulatory tones.
Allow me to save you the unpleasantness of reading them by summarising their results here.
The first issue raised is the lack of early intervention, despite, in almost all cases, the clear knowledge that things were badly wrong in these children’s lives. You do not need a degree in psychology to know that nipping familial problems in the bud when children are still young enough to adapt to new circumstances with relative ease is the most desirable course of action.
We know, for example, that in Daniel’s case a Public Health Nurse had visited his father’s home and knew how unsuitable conditions were. That social services would choose not to intervene is mind-boggling, yet the reports show again and again a failure to act in full knowledge that children were being abused or severely neglected.
The second clear error highlighted is the failure to assess the needs of children when they finally were taken into care proper. What this means is that children with emotional and psychological problems were placed, either with foster families or into existing residential populations without anyone sitting down to examine their case to work out what kind of care they needed.
In other words, the foster parents or residential staff were left to flounder on unassisted and unsupported, with severely distressed children to care for and no idea how best to do it – hence Daniel’s placements consistently breaking down and his being repeatedly moved.
This mess was compounded in many cases by a complete ignoring of challenging, self-destructive behaviour when it inevitably did emerge. Donna told me that Daniel seemed to go out of his way to cause himself harm and to put himself at risk, yet when she reported these issues to social services she was met with shrugs and such useless advice as “change the locks to keep him in” or “take away his Playstation”.
Challenging behaviour is a child’s way of telling the adults around them that they are out of control and need help – it should never be brushed under the carpet as something irrelevant or unimportant. Yet this is exactly what was done.
Care lacking
Frontline care was seen to be lacking in all cases – social workers did not see the children even close to enough to form anything like a meaningful relationship with them.
This is, of course, infuriating, yet when one considers the fact that social workers can have anything upwards of 50 cases on their books at a given time, it becomes more understandable. That this is the standard of care in Ireland for countless children and families on the books of the Child and Family Agency is simply scandalous.
The truth is that what needs to be done to prevent the deaths of young people like Daniel is very simple – of course it requires a massive capital investment in staff, training and a real restructuring of a system that has changed in name only.
Yet there is a more important step that I think would act as a solid foundation for any and all other actions taken.
I am talking about the introduction of the simple human act of caring: our social services seem to have forgotten how to value people, and this is a terrible crime indeed.
Time and again through my own work I have encountered social workers so beaten down by a broken, failing system that they seem to not even realise the harm they are doing by turning away children and families begging for help; because their supervisors and superiors have stopped caring for them, they are unable to care for the people they serve.
Donna and Debbie told the nation that their main message is not to trust the social care system – do not believe your children are safe just because they are in care. The State, they said, is not fit to look after our most vulnerable citizens.
If that isn’t a truly frightening thought, I do now know what is.
Shane Dunphy is a child protection expert and author.