Victoria Climbie

So for Lins lesson I've decided to look at the Victoria Climbie case, the information below is a complete timeline from the BBC as well as the link for it.


2 November 1991:
Victoria Adjo Climbie is born near Abidjan, the Ivory Coast.

November 1998:
Seven-year-old Victoria Adjo Climbie leaves Abobo in the Ivory Coast to lives with her aunt, Marie-Therese Kouao initially in Paris. Kouao takes the girl to London after she is pursued by French authorities over benefit payments.

April - June 1999:
On arrival in England, Victoria's name is given as Anna because of the assumed identity on the false passport used to get her into Europe.

Kouao takes a job as a hospital cleaner and the pair initially live in a hostel in north London. Some weeks later Victoria is on a bus with her aunt when they meet Carl Manning, the driver, for the first time.

July 1999:
Kouao and Victoria, who speaks no English, move into Carl Manning's home in Tottenham, north London. Within days, Victoria would be suffering abuse at the hands of Carl Manning. That abuse would lead to her torture and death.

14 July 1999:

Kouao: Pretended to care for Victoria
Victoria makes her first visit to the Central Middlesex Hospital after the daughter of her childminder suspects the girl has non-accidental injuries. The doctor accepts Kouao's story that Victoria has inflicted the wounds on herself by scratching at scabies sores.

During this period, doctors alert child protection authorities as a precaution. Haringey social worker Lisa Arthurworrey and PC Karen Jones are assigned to the case. They later cancel a home visit scheduled for 4 August after hearing about the scabies.

24 July 1999:
Victoria is taken to North Middlesex Hospital's casualty department with scalding to her head and face. Doctors immediately suspect that the injuries have been deliberately inflicted.

Kouao tells Lisa Arthu4worrey and PC Jones that she poured hot water over Victoria to try and stop her scratching her scalp. She says that Victoria caused other injuries with utensils.

6 August 1999:
Victoria is discharged from the hospital and is collected by Kouao after her explanation for the injuries is accepted by child protection authorities.

October 1999
Trial evidence reveals that from October 1999 until the following January, Carl Manning forces Victoria to sleep in a bin liner in the bath every night at this flat.

1 November 1999L:
Kouao tells social workers that Carl Manning has sexually assaulted Victoria. She withdraws the accusation the next day. PC Jones is asked to investigate why but takes no further action after her letter to Kouao remains unanswered.

24 February 2000
Victoria is rushed to North Middlesex Hospital suffering from a combination of malnutrition and hypothermia. Doctors later transfer her to an intensive care ward at St Mary's Hospital in west London.

25 February 2000:
Victoria is declared dead at 3.15pm at St Mary's Hospital.

Dr Nathaniel Carey, the Home Office pathologist who examines her body, finds 128 separate injuries and scars, many of them cigarette burns, and describes them as "the worst case of child abuse I've encountered".

The Climbie trial


Carl Manning and Marie Therese Kouao are charged with the murder of Victoria Climbie. During police interviews both claim that Victoria was possessed.

November 2000:
The trial opens with the prosecution making it clear that the blame lay not only with Kouao and Manning in the dock but child protection authorities who had been "blindingly incompetent".

Manning denies murder but pleads guilty to child cruelty and manslaughter. Kouao denies all charges.

12 January 2001:
Almost a year after Victoria Climbie's death, Manning and Kouao are found guilty of her murder.

Sentencing both of them to life imprisonment, Judge Richard Hawkins says: "What Anna endured was truly unimaginable. She died at both your hands, a lonely drawn out death".

The Inquiry

April 2001:
The government announces a public inquiry into the death to be headed by Lord Laming.

The inquiry is the first in Britain to use special wide-ranging powers to look at everything from the role of social services to police child protection arrangements.

Ministers make clear that they expect the inquiry to scrutinise the child protection system and not just the failings in the Climbie case.

May 2001:
Lord Laming opens the inquiry and in an unprecedented move calls both Marie Therese Kouao and Carl Manning to give evidence. He says the killers should appear at the inquiry to help it establish where the authorities failed to stop them.

The inquiry is split into two parts. You can read the key stories on the Victoria Climbie special report.

The first part or phase takes the testimony of more than 230 witnesses including neighbours, child protection officers and high-ranking social services officials.

During this phase, the inquiry heard allegations of racism, incompetence and agencies neglecting their duty of care to Victoria. The inquiry hears of 12 occasions when agencies could have intervened and possibly saved the girl's life.

The second part during 2002 uses a series of special one-day seminars to bring invited experts together to debate the nature of the child protection system and help Lord Laming draw up his conclusions.

July 2002
Lord Laming reopens the first phase of the inquiry after it emerges that a critical document by social services inspectors had not been revealed to his team.

August 2002
Carole Baptiste, one of the key social workers in the case, is found guilty of failing to attend the public inquiry and fined $500.

November 2002
Two further social workers at the heart of the Victoria Climbie child abuse scandal are sacked for gross misconduct. Lisa Arthurworrey and her manager Angella Mairs are dismissed by Haringey Council in north London following disciplinary proceedings.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2062590.stm

I can't believe that there were so many times that people could have saved Victoria and that they believed some of the stories that her aunt fed to them. I mean the story about the scalding to her head, whether that was the reasoning behind it or not surely it isn't acceptable to pour boiling water over a child's head??
It really is worrying that it takes cases like this and the death of a young child before child protection authorities investigate and set laws in place.

Derren Brown and Mary Ainsworth

Hey fellow bloggers.

Derren Brown

So I've just finished watching Derren Brown..that man is a genius!

I thought I would write about how I feel Jody was classically conditioned.
When Jody was talking about guilt, he was squeezed on the shoulder or the hotel bell would go off, resulting in Jody associating the hotel bell and shoulder squeezing with guilt.

The conditioned stimulus (hotel bell or squeezing of shoulder) provoked a conditioned response (feeling guilty)

Mary Ainsworth

Mary Ainsworth said there were three types of attachment after her experiment Strange Situation:
Below is how I would describe those attachments in the simplest way.

• Secure attachment- strongly attached to mother, shows a lot of sign of distress when the mother left the room but very quickly calms down once the mother returns. Is friendly with the stranger when mother is in the room, however when mother leaves the room is avoidant of the stranger.
• Resistant attachment-Shows distress when mother leaves the room, however when the mother returns they approach their mother but avoid contact. Is avoidant of the stranger at all times.
• Avoidant attachment- Child isn't distressed when the mother leaves and also shows no sign of interest when she returns. Is happy to play with strangers whether mother was their or not.

TTFN x

The Return

So I've abandoned my blog for a few weeks, apologies blog (been very busy!!)

I thought I would start this blog my writing my highs and lows so far on the course:

Highs

• Being accepted on the course
• Support from fellow course buddies :)
• Support from tutors
• 'Occasionally' understanding things
• Being proud to say I'm a Warwick Uni student
• Being promoted at work
• Student discount!

Lows

• Feeling like I don't understand things as much as I should
• Overwhelmed by reading
• Lack of money due to not working as much
• Trying to juggle uni life with LIFE

Directed Time Activities for Gender

So today I've been looking for websites that talk about Gender and Childhood and found a few interesting ones, have also found another book on Warwick library catalogue. I found that most the ones on there were on the reading list, so below is what I found.

Websites:
      

*http://www.ucm.es/info/rqtr/biblioteca/Educacion%20y%20gltb/same%20sex%20sexuality%20and%20childhood%20gender%20non%20conformity%20a%20sp.pdf – discusses the different explanations as to why a person becomes homosexual.
*http://www.lawsonry.com/864-education-socialization-and-gender-in-childhood/ - talks about how parents can influence their children in their views on gender, if a parent is constantly buying their daughter pink clothes then they believe that it is only right for a girl to wear pink.
*http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=docHYPERLINK - Early Childhood Gender Identity and Sexuality: talks about gender identity development.
 100 word Summary of UCM websiteI found this website interesting as it gave different arguments as to why a child grows up to be a homosexual. The main theory it discusses is the idea that all human beings are born with the potential to be sexual however there is no particular sexual orientation, this is socially determined and influenced by factors such as a person’s culture. It suggests that if a person is in contact with other people that are the same sex sexuality then it is more likely that they will too become homosexual. I found it interesting that it is suggested that it’s all based on nurture as many people who are homosexual claim that it isn’t something they have a choice in therefore this suggests that it could be something they are predisposed with.

University Web Catalogue

**Steedman, C. Language, gender and childhood. Routledge and Kegan, 1985.

History of Childhood

So after today I’m blogging my six key points from Aries, P. Centuries of Childhood, Chapter 2. These points were:

α    Medieval art up until the 12^th Century did not recognise childhood.

α    When children did appear in art the only difference was their height.

α    It appears that the discovery of childhood was in the 13^th Century.

α    Few types of children found in 13^th Century art are closer to the modern concept of childhood.

α    The 17^th Century appears to be of great importance to the evolution of childhood.

α    The general feeling was that you had several children knowing that you would probably only keep a couple.

I found it interesting of how little importance children were to their families as they had been programmed to not get attached to them as they may die at a young age. It was also interesting being able to see the evolution of childhood through art as this is another alternative to reading it if someone would prefer.

On another note…

I found the workshop on Reading and Note-Taking useful last night as it gave me a good idea of ways that I can write notes so that I am only writing relevant things down. Am looking forward to going to a couple more workshops as I feel they will be useful towards my overall study skills.

TTFN x

DTA and Piaget.

Soooo long day today searching for further references and google keyword searches for History of Childhood...

After looking at Warwicks E-catalogue, I found these three further reading references:

·         DeMause, L. 1976, The History of Childhood.

·         Cunningham, H. 2005, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500s.

·         Walvin, J. 1982, A Childs World; A social history to English childhood 1800-1914.

Going to try and get these out tomorrow when we are at Warwick as think these could all be useful.

Now for Google Keyword searches-

• http://www.lloyddemause.com/Lloyd_DeMause_on_Psychohistory/Home.html- this is DeMause's personal site where he discusses the historical evolution of child rearing.
• http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/Childhood_review.pdf- this is a review of DeMause's book The History of Childhood.

Now to print this all off and put it into my special directed time activity folder :D

So far for Fionas lesson the information I have on Piaget is:

Piaget’s Stage Theory of Cognitive Development

Swiss biologist and psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) observed his children (and their process of making sense of the world around them) and eventually developed a four-stage model of how the mind processes new information encountered. He posited that children progress through 4 stages and that they all do so in the same order. These four stages are:

• Sensorimotor stage (Birth to 2 years old). The infant builds an understanding of himself or herself and reality (and how things work) through interactions with the environment. It is able to differentiate between itself and other objects. Learning takes place via assimilation (the organization of information and absorbing it into existing schema) and accommodation (when an object cannot be assimilated and the schemata have to be modified to include the object.
• Preoperational stage (ages 2 to 4). The child is not yet able to conceptualize abstractly and needs concrete physical situations. Objects are classified in simple ways, especially by important features.
• Concrete operations (ages 7 to 11). As physical experience accumulates, accomodation is increased. The child begins to think abstractly and conceptualize, creating logical structures that explain his or her physical experiences.
• Formal operations (beginning at ages 11 to 15). Cognition reaches its final form. By this stage, the person no longer requires concrete objects to make rational judgements. He or she is capable of deductive and hypothetical reasoning. His or her ability for abstract thinking is very similar to an adult.

Bye Now x

First official week :)

So half way through the first official week of our degree....

I have been searching high and low through my mums books and she seems to have a lot on ICT- unfortunately majority of them are about teaching ICT in Primary schools but I am going to photocopy a few pages out of the books that I think could be useful.
I'm also posting this link https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/teachers/ which has a lot about e-safety on which I think will be useful for ICT presentation. I think this will be useful as it would be useful for us to look at both pros and cons of ICT and the child.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/02/facebook-children-bullying-fake-names- I thought this could be useful as it talks about how children are using Facebook, unfortunately it is more about older children to teens but thought it made a good point on how easy it is for children who are not old enough to access the site.

Warwick Day... my oh my that place is overwhelming! I'm going to try and get over there every couple of weeks I think and make use of the library as there were more than enough books on Education. A bit disappointed in going over to collect my University card to find out there has been yet more problems with Warwicks system so the card isn't ready. Seem to be on a constant rollercoaster ride with Warwick having my high and low points- hopefully after Monday (when everything will be sorted) will be high points from then on.

Fionas lesson today.. I found it interesting learning about the different components through child development- in particular language development as I didn't realise so many things could count towards this, i.e. Drawing, writing and even play.
    I think for the theory we need to find more information on next week I may choose Piaget, simply because I think there will be plenty of information I can find out about Piaget- however I will keep you posted as I may change my mind.

My only worry today is Study Skills as I'm all of a sudden panicking about the portfolio, I think I know what we need to do but am now doubting myself but will double check next week.