I thought I would share a couple of anecdotes I heard from two young mums this weekend. Both scared the hell out of me and made me glad that I am not a parent of a small child today in this paranoid world where the authorities want to believe child abuse is happening all the time so that for once they can stop it before another tragic case hits the headlines.
The first story concerns a mum of two - one under five and the other over five. The woman tells me that she had cause to go into a council accommodation shop where the toddler threw a massive tantrum and threw himself to the floor. The woman couldn't believe it when, later in the day, she had a visit from the SS and police who searched her house and inspected her children. It appears a council member of staff phoned social services to say the mother had dropped her child on its head on purpose. Needless to say the children were fine but the mother was left traumatised and it upset the children.
Now, you might say, so what is the problem? No harm done. Child protection ensured. Well, my point is that the authorities are so terrified of another Baby P case that they are targetting the majority of underclass parents and appear to approch them with a view that because they are from the same class as Baby P, they must be child abusers. Why, I ask, do the majority have to suffer this inhuman indignity because the authorities still cannot stop those minority cases of child abuse from happening? They didn't learn after Maria Coldwell in the 70s, they didn't learn from Victoria Climbie, and I doubt very much that they will learn after Baby P. I would say that picking on young parents who are easy to bully amounts to passing the buck and making the authorities look as if they are actually doing something useful when they are not!
The second case that I found so disturbing was that of another young mum who told of how her little boy was playing, fell, and banged his head on concrete as kids often do. It used to be called part of growing up when my kids were small. Now it terrifies good parents. In this case, the young mum wanted to take her son to A&E to be sure he was OK, but she was terrified that someone in authority, keen to stop another child abuse case, would see the injury differently. She reluctantly decided not to take the boy to hospital. Obviously, she kept a close eye on him and he was absolutely fine. But what on earth have we come to that we live in a country where young parents are terrified of having their children taken from them simply because of innocent cicumstances which could be misread by an inexperienced jobsworth.
I wonder if NuLab's pet middle class parents would be viewed with the same suspicion. I highly doubt it.