More fermenting festering.

One thing I left out in the previous, was what happened between V's 12th and her 16th.

At 12 as I said she was about to end up seeing to the needs of old men who do not wash a lot.

She was not an easy girl to like. Her early life had left her finding it very hard to be loved. If the people who love you hurt you, you have to defend yourself. Especially if you are a child. If the people you love and who love you are not predictable then you have to defend yourself. If the person you love choses someone who is hateful and hurtful to you, you do the same.

You build a great big wall around yourself, a big high one, with wire on the top. You defend yourself by creating hate, you know others dislike for you keeps them out, keeps you safe. To let them see the lovely person you are is to let them in and once in they can hurt you.

I'm not putting any of that up as an explanation, she is the expert on her, but I reckon this tree I am barking up is not far from the right one...

Over the years, we did not a lot, people who parent are in the position of handing the child the lego, thats all you can do. Hand them the lego and they either build a castle or throw the set out of the window. Foster carers go out into the garden, pick up the bits and take them back into the house to try again. It's what we do.

She went through crashing cycles where she would build and build and build then break it all down.

Thing was though she had her social worker.

A rock, a firm foundation, quite something else.

When she "decided" she was not "doing school" any more. SW could have talked about rights, she could have said we cannot make her. Nope, she said: "get on the bus and get into school".

Without lots of rights explainers to tell her she didn't have to, she did what was right for her.

Sometimes we adults forget that we are, the adults that is.

Every right carries a responsibility in it's back pack.

If I exercise a right I have responsibility for what happens if it all goes wrong. And if I am not mature enough to take the responsibility, giving me the right is a form of abuse. It is setting me up to fail.

Yes of course give kids rights when they have no understanding of responsibility, why not give babies guns while we are at it.

This was one of the best bits about her Social Worker, she was person centered.

Just as it says in the job specification.

When mum threw out the abusive boyfriend, Social worker didn't just do her job, fill in a referral form for the domestic violence team and forget about it; she went round the house and helped mum do what was needed, herself.

That's proper outside the tick box person centered social work.

V matured in ways that frequently delighted management and me.

When her school were off doing their outward bound and they got completly blisteringly lost. She was the calm voice that took charge and got them out of there. A born leader opened her wings and flew.

When she was 15 she said she wanted to be a foster carer, the calm maturity, the diligence, the caring person she had allowed herself to become was someone I thought I would be really happy to leave my own kids with.

This was the complete opposite of the child who arrived three years before and who is today, three years after.

Which makes it the more distressing for us, we didn't raise her to do what she has done now.

We handed her into the care of leaving care only to discover they didn't and between them and the toilet checkers they would try and stop us from caring too.

Being actively prevented from caring is abusive I reckon.

But as the toilet checker said "she only wanted to do her job and do what she was told".

I have a few things I would like to tell her, I am not sure she would not perceive them as abuse....

R

Fermenting festering part the one (a)

Something I left out of the scenrio yesterday was the baby.

Now we consideredit one of our biggest success stories that the Bigger V got all the way through her time with us being just herself and not have a little miniture V in tow.

In fact to be honest I am not sure how we did as she was certainly a very popular girl.

But anyway V has finished up with a baby, which she abandoned last year.

Really, when you look at her life story you wonder how she could be expected to be a mother to anyone without an awful lot of help and support.

Naturally, this was not what leaving care are about, despite this she managed to do a pretty good job most of the time. Up until the point the wheels fell off her life again.

So anyway the baby looks set to go for adoption and that is "good". You see the service gets a tick in the box for every child it has adopted and you can find people to adopt babies.

So, if a former looked after child has a baby, lacks the skills to parent, does not get the help they need, has to pretty much go it alone until they have to give up the child then thats called a "good outcome".

I wonder if parents out there would think about how they might feel to have a child taken from them because they cannot adequatly parent, now imagine that their background was not that stable anyway and they didn't have much self esteem to loose anyway.

But I had to include this as my post yesterday was so negative I had to go back and include something positive.

It is a "good outcome" isn't it????

R

Fermenting festering part one of two....

Really to get the point of our current situation you need to go back a few years.

We fostered a 12 year old girl who was perceived as being in danger of ending up in the bus station with the old men, the ones we are told do not wash a lot.

We went through quite a party with our big V, big V to tell her apart from the other and altogether littler V (about whom I could write another tale as bad as what is to follow). Well, years passed, loads of S&&& came our way and we stuck in there and ended up with a daughter of whom we were enormously proud.

By 16 this was turning into a serious success story, she was in school, had never been arrested, was virtually unknown to the local law and holding down a weekend job locally where she was well respected.

Of course then came something really traumatic and life changing. She turned 16. Now as traumas go being 16 is not too bad, well unless you are a child on a care order held by Daycastle. The leaving care worker came down the drive and things unraveled.

It would of course be so much easier to meet her needs if she lived in Daycastle and so she was seduced back to the big city.

This was her GCSE year and pretty soon it was clear that she could not be forced to go to school... Errr excuse me, no one ever forced her here either, we just EXPECTED that she did. She could not be forced to go to work, no we didn't force her either, we had an EXPECTATION that she get a job. You name it, from getting out of bed in the morning to paying the rent, there was a huge list of things she had a right not to do....

Funny thing was this "freedom" did not seem to make her happy.

There were good times though, we got an invite to one of her many "new" flats and there was a real pride in her place and a cake obviously bought in specially for the day. That flame of progress she had lit in her life was not out - yet.

But she could only ever hold it together for so long, and when she wasn't coping she needed someone to be there alongside her, have faith in her and sometimes even say "no you don't do that". What she got though was not positive mentoring but someone who supported her right not to do things and only expected her to fail.

It was impossible for us to do much from 100 miles away, especially since the agency would not help us in any way and could not understand why we would want to.

On one occasion we dropped everything, drove to collect her from hospital at midnight, a job the leaving care team should have picked up, they wouldn't even pay our petrol. And their job is to support the child and help them maintain their social networks??

That's another thing not joined up about foster care. We are expected to treat these children as ours, then pass them on like a library book. You know, even when you read a book you often go back to it in the future.

Proper foster care is about stability, trust and care. Care is not a switch to be turned on and off at will.

So anyway we got another phone call this time a solicitor. Would we take her on bail, she had no where to live and was currently in jail. Leaving care phoned next, would we take her, of course we could have anything we needed except money no petrol money never mind something for her food.

That would be fine, if she moved in here she had a job waiting for her. Embarrassed silence at the other end of the phone.

Now at this stage I told leaving care this all smacked of good practice and continuity for looked after children, or put another way I could not see the toilet checking service going for it quite the opposite in fact.

So I went to court, faced judge Jeffries and she got banged up some more.

Then came closer the time she would have been released and the toilet checkers decided a risk assessment was needed. Now there was plenty of time for this it could all have been done in time.

My fear was, that I would go to court to collect her and the TC's would decide on the day the answer was no.

Now, telling someone for months that this is going to happen, then on the day saying "No actually you are homeless" Falls a wee bit short of best practice in social work in my book. Make that person someone who is already a vulnerable service user, and phrases like "professional malpractice" spring to mind.

It's funny though everyone was quite adamant that this was not on the cards. Leaving care were saying she was coming to us and the toilet inspectors were saying nothing.

So anyway, the day before the court case, at 5 PM in the afternoon to be precise, we had the chief toilet inspector on the phone and she was adamant. They had done a risk assessment and Big V was not to come here. About a week too late to say that replied the MD, then things took a turn for the sinister. Go get big V and they would come and get the other looked after children. Good old fashioned oppressive practice aka Emotional Blackmail, we thought.

Ahh but there was more, in terms of giving reasons they were blissfully vague. They simply would not say. Since then we have managed to work out by our own research, they had information that might indicate she was a risk to children.

Now let's recap the situation here there are 7 children in this house, had they removed 3 to keep them safe they would also have been putting 4 children at risk.

Further more for the Rumpoles out there, the UK law has changed, confidentiality and data protection do not apply, they had a legal duty to share and an offence was committed when they did not.

You do not have to know the Children's Act backwards or to be able to recite the Codes of Practice for Social Work by heart to end up with a fairly full page of things that really should be shared with the Care Council if not some old chap in a wig.

Ahh yes talking chaps with a wig, next morning the phone rang, it was big V's solicitor. He was about to spring her and where was she to go. So I brought him up to speed. He went off to phone leaving care and probation, who knowing that a vulnerable young adult was about to become homeless decided to do the sensible thing - hide.

To this day, if leaving care were asked I do not know where she is. Despite promising to keep us informed as to where she went and to try to let us help them engage with her in a meaningful constructive way.

It's OK though, we have her phone number. We know that with their help and support she was back in jail within three months.

You could almost print this off and hand it to social work students and run a competition to see who could come up with the most points of bad practice...

You certainly could not make it up...

Oh but the caption says part one of two.

There must be more to come.....

Actually, I could make that three, or four, or five....

R