It is snot central around here. Botany has had one streaming cold after another, complete with the nastiest goo emitting from her nose. When I first thought about having kids, I admit that one of the things that really, really put me off was the thought of how some children seem to have this permanently snotty beak. Why, I used to muse, catching sight of some crusty urchin on the bus, can't the mother keep the face of their offspring clean? Ah, the irony. I'm forever dabbing at Botany's nose with a wipe or a tissue and five minutes later, she is covered anew in a fresh coating of oobleck.
On another, much grimmer note- like much of the nation, I am following the story of Baby P with a mixture of horror, disgust and sadness. For those of you not familiar with the case, I warn you- it's disturbing stuff. A 17 month old baby was abused to death by his mother, her boyfriend and a lodger. What makes it all the more horrendous is that despite repeated opportunities for the authorities to intervene (or even to notice that something was seriously wrong), nothing appears to have been done to prevent it from happening.
I've chosen a link to a news article without the graphic illustrations of Baby P's injuries; the full catalogue of abuse is readily available if you want to see it- but I think it's enough to say- the harm inflicted on this poor wee boy was dreadful. And the particular fact that the baby was seen by a doctor in the hospital two days before his death with eight broken ribs and a broken back, and that the doctor failed to even carry out a proper examination- well, it wrenches my heart and makes me so unspeakably sad.
The killers are in jail, and are likely to be for a long time. Apparently, they are not even particularly sorry about any of it. Meanwhile, the media is carrying out an intensive dissection of what went wrong and when it all happened and who was responsible and what is to be done about it. What I, like many people, are thinking is- will it do any good? For all the handwringing and fingerpointing going on, can things ever really change? People are abusing their children, and often getting away with it. What's the solution? What the fuck is wrong that the systems in place to protect the young and vulnerable are failing so badly that a child ends up dying in such horrific circumstances? Or have things always essentially been like this, and there are always going to be cases where we shake our heads in disgust and mourn more than a little for a baby we never knew? Either way, there is something badly, badly wrong.
I don't know. I don't have any answers. I'm sure those at the coalface of working with difficult cases would say that it's not that easy. I'm sure it must be hard, in practice, to walk the careful line between assessing someone as a crappy, inadequate parent (but yet determining that nobody is likely to end up dead or maimed for life) to making the actual call that the situation is so bad that the child has to be removed, immediately, into care. But logic and reason would suggest that if nothing else, repeated incidents of trips to the hospital with an child who was exhibiting increasingly severe injuries and trauma should have made a difference. It didn't- and that's what is so hard to understand, to comprehend.
Poor baby P. It makes me want to hug Botany that little bit tighter, to make sure as best I can that nothing bad ever happens to her, despite knowing we live in a world which often seems full of such cruel madness, such inexplicable tragedy.
