The guardians of child safety

YOU can hardly open a newspaper these days without reading about how childhood is under threat. Here, Jim Leivers, chairman of the Oldham Local Safeguarding Children Board describes the role of the group to Karen Doherty

If the headlines are to be believed, kids who play out doors are at risk from paedophiles lurking around corners or the “epidemic” of knife crime, gangs and drugs.

And indoors is no safer with the spectre of internet grooming or violent video games.

Children are seemingly being denied the chance to climb trees and get into scrapes by over cautious parents (who bemoan the loss of their halcyon childhood outdoors) and cosseted by apocryphal health and safety chiefs banning the likes of conkers.

Sorting the fact from the fiction can be hard but Oldham has its own group of professionals whose job it is to keep the borough’s 62,000 children safe, as well as those visiting the area, from threats such as stranger danger, drug misuse, violence at home, sexual exploitation, bullying or traffic accidents.

Oldham Local Safeguarding Children Board is made of experts from all walks of life involved with children: health, local authority, police, fire, mental health workers and voluntary workers from bodies such as the NSPCC.

Their aim is clear: working together to ensure that all children and young people are safe and feel safe in their homes, schools and communities.

It is not about “barmy” health and safety, but making real differences to children’s lives such as improving road safety, checking private fostering arrangements, advising parents how to keep their children safe on-line, tracking children who disappear from school . . . the list goes on.

For example, Oldham works with Rochdale and Bury to review every child death whether from natural causes, accident or abuse.

Jim Leivers, the independent board chairman, explained: “That really is about looking at whether we can learn lessons. For example, if we were to find we were getting a lot of deaths on a road in a particular area, what are we going to do about it?”

Changes

Over recent years organisations that work with children and families in Oldham and nationally have had to make many changes to the way they protect and safeguard youngsters.

This has been in response to changes in legislation, practice and policy and tragic events such as the death of Victoria Climbié in London in 2002.

The eight-year-old was tortured to death by her great-aunt, Marie Therese Kouao, and the woman’s boyfriend Carl Manning. But an inquiry chaired by the former chief inspector of social services, Lord Laming, identified a catalogue of failures by authorities to intervene.

The tragedy pointed to a complete breakdown in the multi-agency approach to child protection and Local Safeguarding Children Boards were part of the response to this.

Oldham’s board was set up in April 2006 and was one of the first to appoint an independent chairman, seen as crucial to accountability.

Its work has included:

Overseeing Operation Messenger which is tackling the sexual exploitation of girls as young as 12 in the borough.

Sending a positive parenting handbook (which is currently being reprinted) to every family with a child in Oldham. It contains advice on managing issues such as bullying, childminding and substance misuse.

Child protection training for imams in all mosques.

Drawing up protocol advising schools, colleges and organisations working with youngsters how to recognise the deal with the signs of forced marriage.

An internet safety strategy to keep children safe on-line.

The recent spate of teenage suicides in South Wales, apparently (and some claim dangerously) linked by the press, highlights how child deaths dominate the headlines.

But Surrey-based Mr Leivers, whose background includes 30 years in child protection and children’s services roles, reassured “Most children who die do not die through trauma, they die form a life-limiting illness. Children who 20 years ago would never have seen their way out of the hospital.”

Despite the headlines, he is not convinced that childhood is more dangerous than when he was young, but believes that the reporting of incidents has much to do with parents’ fears.
“You listen to people of my age, how it was such a glorious time in the 1950s as a child. People were safer, people didn’t lock their doors and there weren’t paedophiles. There were.

“A child’s world now is so much more complicated than a child of the 50s, they are expected to know more things, but people shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it’s rare for a child to be harmed.

“There are no more dangers lurking on the street than there were 30/40 years ago.