Maids and Childcare

I found the article at the bottom of this post from the Guardian UK online. And what struck me was, this article may be about the scenario in the UK but I am certain it is a universal problem.

Closer to home, the government is always harping on how the local employers treat foreign workers who are employed as home help badly. Cases of mistreatment of these Indonesian workers are sensationalised to huge proportions to the point that the Indonesian government has stepped in to request for higher wages and better treatment for their citizens who work here. However I am perturbed that nothing is said about the quality of these Indonesian maids who are brought in. Some would run away from their employer's homes within days of being placed there and the employer would have to bear all the costs. Those who stay sometimes treat the children under their care very badly. Due to such high cost of living in a metropolitan city like Kuala Lumpur, both parents work long hours outside their homes and the children are left with these unqualified maids. Since I work from home, I sometimes observe the way these maids treat these children. There are some good ones, but in general, they would be sitting together by about 10 am and waste their day chatting away, only to get into the house when the employers are coming home in the evening. There are some who invite men into their employer's homes. There is one particular maid who really upset me, because I often see her screaming at the children under her care. Even when the poor children return from school, I bet, tired and longing for a loving welcome, I would hear her shouting at them in a very brusque way, asking them to take off their shoes. I would just go to the front of the house and stand there with my hands on my hips, so she knows I am watching..and things will quiet down. I still hear her patronising the children sometimes, and I would go out of the house to make sure that she knows I am listening. I had a mind of telling the parents when they return from work, but once, I saw the maid scolding the children in front of their parents while the just kept quiet and allowed her to do so..what else can I say. Perhaps parents in Malaysia are that desperate. I still keep my ears and eyes open..I have not seen any physical abuse, but if I do, I will head straight to the police station..though I wonder if they will take this seriously..been there done that..but at least I would be doing my part.



How can a child be beaten to death, yet no one is jailed for murder?
When my workmates heard I had applied to join Hackney's child protection team, they asked me: "What the hell are you going there for?" It was a fair question. Nobody wanted to join the "Cardigan Squad" – the name given to child protection officers who were seen as woolly, glorified social workers who mopped up after domestic abuse cases.

It was the least glamorous department in the Metropolitan Police, a career cul-de-sac. Ambitious officers were expected to fight drug dealers and terrorists, the exciting big-budget departments with cool gadgets and prestigious operations.

Not me: I wanted to get my hands dirty. And, unlike almost everyone else, I was in a position to do something about it. So, instead of accepting an offer to head part of a major new glamorous drugs task force, I transferred to child protection.

Within a few months, I had fought machete-wielding thugs, rescued children who had pit bulls chained to their cots and confronted the horrors of ritual abuse. I had rescued dozens of kids from crack houses, kids living in unimaginable filth and kids who had burned down their own homes.

Then there were the hostage situations, the lynch mobs and the almost impossible job of interviewing paedophiles. There was no shortage of cases to investigate. Several hundred children were on our radar at any one time and I soon had 22 on my own list to deal with.

One of my first cases was that of an elderly couple who were bringing up their grandchild on their own. We had received reports that they had been struggling to cope and that the flat was in a bad way. That wasn't the half of it.

The grandfather answered the door. He was missing a limb and covered in scabs. "Do you mind me asking why you have those scabs?" I asked. "Are you ill?" He stared back at me blankly for a moment. "Oh, these!" he said suddenly. "Nah, that's the bloody rats. They nibble my face at night." Good God.

"And what about your...?" I said, pointing at the missing limb. "Yeah, well, that was an infection from the rats; the docs had to lop it off." Christ. They were slowly eating him alive.

I did everything I could: The man was arrested, received words of advice, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute and the child wasn't taken into care.

My next appointment that day was also par for the course. From the moment I stepped inside the flat, a low vicious growling came from upstairs. The house was a tip. There was hardly any furniture, rubbish and bin liners containing clothes covered the floor; there were sheets that looked as if they hadn't been washed in years draped over a tatty sofa doubling as a bed.

I was steadily overpowered by the stink of animal faeces as I climbed. He started to say: "I wouldn't mate…", but it was too late. The foul smell was forgotten in an instant when an enraged pit bull leapt for my face; its jaws snapped shut just shy of my nose; it was held by a long chain clamped to the leg of a cot.

I ran back downstairs. I couldn't believe I'd seen this. Animals such as that can, and do, tear children to shreds. I told the father that the animal had to go or we would remove his kids.

Then there were the likes of Tyrell, a 19-month-old toddler who died in 2003 after being punched repeatedly in the head. Tyrell's mother, Sandra Rowe, 29, lived with John White.

After he died, we discovered that we had dealt with Tyrell before. Even worse: he had been taken off the child protection register six days before he was killed. Social services had seen Tyrell four times in the month before he died. But, as ever, it's not that straightforward.

Until the day of Tyrell's death, all his injuries were below the neck. By law, a social worker cannot lay a hand on a child whom he or she is visiting. So if the child is wearing jumpers and the parents are clever enough to make the right noises, the social worker will tick the box and leave, no doubt running with folders full of case information to catch the bus to the next case meeting, to see the third family that day, to stop by a care home to check on a child, to pick up their own kids from school and whatever else was on their impossible schedule.

Tyrell had died needlessly. The question is: would he still be alive if social services had more resources?

When Tyrell was born, social workers placed Rowe, who was judged to be sufficiently retarded as to be unable to cope on her own, and her son under 24-hour supervision at a foster home. But when she started seeing White, it was taken as a blessing and she was discharged. Six months later, after months of abuse, Tyrell was dead.

White and Rowe were charged with murder, but lack of evidence meant they were prosecuted for child cruelty instead. A post-mortem examination revealed that almost every bone in Tyrell's body had been fractured. His thigh bone had been twisted, he had seven fractured ribs and a broken collarbone, and was covered in bruises. White was sentenced to three years. Rowe, who had an IQ of 50 and a reading age of five, received a two-year supervision and treatment order.

I find it hard to live with the fact that a child can be beaten to death in the presence of its official carers and yet neither of them are either prosecuted for murder, or for the fact that the child died while in their care. New laws have introduced greater culpability in these cases, but the loophole still exists and this case was by no means the exception. Last April, Claire Biggs, from Newham, east London, was found guilty of child cruelty, while her partner, Paul Husband, was successfully prosecuted for neglect. Rhys, Biggs's two-month-old son, died on 8 May 2006 and was found to have 17 broken ribs, a broken shoulder and a fractured arm. As the cause of Rhys's death could not be established, the pair faced only cruelty charges. Biggs was jailed for eight years. Is that justice?


Once again, the attacks went unnoticed by health workers, although they had known that Biggs had another child taken into care in 2001. Yet again, there were missed opportunities, and a breakdown in sharing information. After the Tyrell trial, Hackney council issued a statement: "The area child protection committee is concluding its investigation. Recommendations will be implemented by the respective agencies. Appropriate action will be taken as required if individual failings are identified." But the results of their investigation were never made public.

It is precisely this sort of reaction that increases the public's antagonism towards social workers. I have not read this report, but there is another element here. It may have uncovered good practice by social workers as well. The good work that social services undoubtedly do is rarely revealed. I am all for lambasting incompetency and serious mistakes, but social workers seem to operate in a world without recognition. This is not good for their morale or their profession – and therefore, for children. We need to be transparent. It's the children whom we are supposed to be protecting, after all.

When I joined the child protection team, I thought I had all the answers. I thought, for example, that social workers were the source of many of our problems. But I soon discovered that most social workers are dedicated professionals. Dev, a social worker, told me: "It's one of the toughest jobs in Britain, if not the toughest. Many of us crumble, some more quickly than others. Others resort to defence mechanisms; a sort of survival whereby they 'shut down', numb themselves so they don't 'see' what's in front of them any more. But who watches out for this? Nobody. Nobody but us, and we're all so busy it's every man and woman for him or herself until it hits the fan."

Our social care system needs a massive overhaul: too many social workers have become demoralised. We have paedophiles who have been in trusted positions in society escaping with light sentences time and again. Our child protection system is outdated. There have been at least 70 public inquiries into its tragic failures. Inevitably, Lord Laming's report on the murder of Victoria Climbié repeated many of their recommendations. But the key points remain: lack of communication between agencies that should be working together; lack of training; lack of supervision; unqualified social work staff undertaking complex assessments.

How have we let this come to pass? Why is it that children, the most precious, most vulnerable part of our society, are not provided with a five-star service to protect them when things go wrong? Is it to do with funding? These are real kids dying here, kids in England, in London, the greatest, richest city in the world, dying for the lack of a really effective system, more training and, most importantly, more social workers.

We've been ignoring what is an enormous problem for far too long. We have to accept that a significant proportion of the population abuse thousands of children every day. Until we do so, and until we start changing our attitudes towards troublesome children, we are all guilty of neglect. The good news is that children can recover. It's up to us to get to them quickly enough and to provide them with the right kind of intervention.

"Baby X", Det Sgt Harry Keeble's account of his years working for the Hackney child protection team until 2006, is published this week. Keeble is a pseudonym adopted at the insistence of the Metropolitan Police.

You can also read the article here