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Comment: Fatal mistakes
Evening Standard17 Jul 2008
The case of Vivian Gamor, the paranoid schizophrenic who murdered her two children in Hackney last year, offers a deeply disturbing insight into the operation of the borough's social services. Despite the children's father, Jimi Ogunkoya, warning the authorities of his former partner's mental problems and her record of violence, social services gave the woman unsupervised visiting rights. A report published today finds "organisational and individual failings" but fails to identify any single official judgment as being responsible for the tragedy.
Hackney council says that it has already implemented all the report's recommendations. But the fact that it could have allowed a parent with a history of severe mental problems and violent behaviour to be alone with her children beggars belief. This is the same council that allowed three asylum seekers to torture their eight-year-old Angolan niece because they thought she was a witch; they were jailed in 2005. How is it possible that public officials can continue to make such egregious errors, above all after the case of Victoria Climbie and the Laming report that followed it in 2000?
The recommendations in today's report - greater involvement of a child's other parent or carers in risk assessment, better record keeping - are surely a matter of simple common sense. That Hackney's child protection officials and others need to be told - again - to do them does not inspire much confidence in their calibre, or in their ability to prevent such appalling cases happening again.
