"I'd rather be found dead on the street from an overdose than spend another night in Newtown House."
For 10 years, an Irish family has been neglected and abused. Everyone knows about it but no one has helped
Six years on from the death of 15-year-old Kim O'Donovan, Ireland's record on child protection continues to fall indefensibly short of expectations
THERE is a family in the west of Ireland, and everyone knows the children are being abused. They know it from their matted, liceinfested hair. They know it from the bruises on their skin, and their thin, starved bodies. They know it from the smell. For 10 years, the children have been neglected, beaten, mentally tortured and . . . it is strongly suspected . . . sexually abused. For 10 years, social workers have been called in, and then called again.
Everyone knows it's happening. But no one has helped.
This case . . . and many others . . .
confirm a grim reality: six years after 15-year-old Kim O'Donovan escaped from residential care and died of a heroin overdose, Ireland's record on child protection continues to fall indefensibly short of expectations. This past week, it was revealed that health authorities received more than 6,000 reports of child abuse in 2004, and that 60% of those cases had yet to be resolved.
New figures also showed that, for the first time in Ireland, more than 5,000 children are now in state care, with poverty, neglect and parental inability to cope at the top of the list of causes.
For the people working on the ground, the situation seems bleak.
"It's like trying to hold back a little bit of the tide while the rest of the water rushes all around you, " says Janice, an experienced child welfare professional in Dublin. "It surprises me that children don't get killed more often, and I am not being dramatic when I say that. The standards in care are still very poor, and the services to help families are still very disjointed. There is no communication or co-ordination between services. Some children are getting the same treatment from different services, while other children are on waiting lists of two years and are getting no help at all.
No one is talking to anyone else, and no one is monitoring the bigger picture. The situation is easily still as bad as it was [when Kim O'Donovan died]."
According to Janice, both public health nurses and teachers have a huge responsibility in helping to alleviate child abuse in Ireland.
"They are the only two agencies that have access to all the children in the country, " she said. "But I think children are being seriously disadvantaged by our education system, because teachers are not reporting a lot of the abuse that they witness to social workers.
Some are afraid of violating the child protection laws, others have had bad experiences with social workers in the past. But their role is vital."
A teacher from the west of Ireland, Moira, agrees with this view, but has been deeply frustrated by the inaction of social workers in the past. It is this teacher who tells of the family of abused children, of whom everyone knows, and no one has helped.
"The children do get attention from the social workers for short periods of time, " she says. "Afterwards, they'll come into school, and instead of lice literally falling from their hair onto their copybooks, their heads will have been totally shaved. And they'll have to wear hats for a few weeks. And then it starts again."
Moira says that every teacher and every child in the school is aware of the physical abuse and neglect suffered in this family. "The children are literally starved-looking, and they are so dirty, and smelly, it's horrific, " she says. "They are totally excluded by the other children. No one will hold their hands in the line to go down to the yard. No one will sit beside them at circle time. I cannot imagine how psychologically damaging it must be."
Teachers in Moira's school now strongly suspect that sexual abuse has also begun at home. "Their family life is extremely similar to what Sophie McColgan suffered, " says Moira. "And yet, the social workers have not removed them from the house, and we have to sit in school every day and know that we are looking at children who are experiencing the most horrific abuse. Is that right? In 10 years' time, one of those children will take a case against us, and everyone will ask why no one did anything. And I don't know what the answer will be."
In Dublin, another primary teacher, Jenny, has similar tales of neglect, and the powerlessness she feels to stop it. She tells of a family of four children under the age of 11, who were abandoned by their parents and were living alone in their house for a week before the youngest child . . . a four-year old . . .
told his teacher.
"We reported the case, but we never heard anything else about it from the social workers, " she said.
"There's just no feedback at all. It feels like it's a dead-end, because nothing seems to happen. The children you report still come in hungry or dirty or physically abused. Or a social worker will come back and say the dad wouldn't let them in the door. And that's the end of it."
According to Jenny, this has led to a perception among some teachers that there is no point in alerting social workers to child abuse, because it won't make a difference.
"When you lodge a complaint, you are running the risk of being attacked by the parents of the child, " she said. "A lot of parents will become very aggressive, and it is very frightening for teachers. So if you honestly think, from experience, that social workers are not going to help the situation in any way, then there is a temptation to let abuses go unreported. I would say that 50% of the abuses in our school are not reported by teachers."
The obvious dangers of this communication breakdown are acknowledged by Declan Coogan, communications co-ordination officer for the Irish Association of Social Workers, who said that in order for comprehensive co-ordination between schools and social workers, more staff are needed.
"We are responsible for investigating every single allegation of abuse, and treating every single case, and we are chronically under-resourced, " he said. "There are impossible demands being put on social workers, which means there are now a staggering number of cases that have been reported and not investigated. There is so much more that could be done if we had the time and resources. It is certainly not helpful that the Health Service Executive (HSE) has an embargo on the employment of more social workers at the moment." A HSE spokesman denied that such an embargo is in operation.
When the cases are finally resolved, it sometimes means that children will be taken from their families and put into care. According to Jennifer Gargan, director of the Irish Association of Young People in Care, a lot more work needs to be done to ensure that children have a voice about where they go, and what direction their future takes.
"A child coming into care is going to be very distressed and disadvantaged from the offset, " she said.
"In many cases, they're bundled into meetings with lots of professionals, and their future home is discussed, and the children are given no voice in what happens to them.
We try to provide that advocacy through our children's rights and participation officers, who listen to the children's concerns and then communicate this on their behalf.
But there are only two of these officers in the entire country at the moment, so obviously they can only do so much."
Gargan said that more attention also needed to be given to aftercare for children who had been taken from their homes. "In theory, unless a child is in full-time education, they are out on their own when they turn 18. On average, children from care will leave home five years earlier than other children, and they will leave with less education and fewer support services. This leads to high levels of homelessness, and many of them end up in prison.
"I think there is a legal and moral obligation on the HSE to look after a person in care the same way as any good parent would . . . and that includes continuing to offer them support after they turn 18. More than anyone else, these are the people in our society who need a safety net. And more than anyone else, they're being left to fall."
DEATH OF KIM O'DONOVAN SHOCKED THE NATION AS A child, Kim O'Donovan was like any other. A family friend later said she came from a "loving, warm and inviting" home. But when she reached puberty, Kim began to display behavioural problems, and she was placed in the residential care centre, Newtown House in Co Wicklow.
Almost immediately, serious problems arose. At the age of 13, Kim ran away from Newtown House and spent a week sleeping rough on the streets. She was finally spotted by a family friend, wandering around Dublin city centre. Kim said she had spent the night in the toilets in St Stephen's Green. Her wrists were cut and her body was covered in sores.
Kim's mother tried desperately to get medical help for her daughter, whom she believed was suffering from serious behavioural difficulties, and needed specialist care. Just months before Kim died, workers at Newtown House admitted that the psychological treatment she was receiving was inadequate.
Kim's mother made numerous calls for help to the Eastern Health Board, but got no response. She then pleaded with officials to find a more adequate care placement for her daughter. This request was also ignored.
Kim herself wrote a letter to Judge Peter Kelly, begging him to let her transfer to a different unit. This letter was never sent by staff at Newtown because the judge's name was not on the girl's personal contact list.
At school, Kim was showing a fundamental desire to better herself. Before she died, she repeated her Junior Cert because she felt she could achieve higher results. She scored three As and two Bs, and had made the decision to study for her Leaving Cert in mainstream education.
An investigation into practices at the care centre from which Kim so desperately wanted to escape was later to shock the nation. A report revealed serious injuries to children, including one incident where a child had a leg broken while being restrained.
Children were told to hold towels around their naked bodies, and were then searched. There was excessive use of physical restraint on children. One girl was restrained by two male workers while a female worker opened her bra in a search for cigarettes.
Newtown House was closed by the authorities shortly after Kim's death.
But it was too late for the 15-year old, who ran away from the centre for the last time in the summer of 2000 and ended up in a Dublin B&B where, that August, she injected herself with enough heroin to end her life.
