BSCP2021-22-01
This Child Safeguarding Practice Review briefing note focuses on a family in which systematic physical assaults were carried out by the parents against their eldest children over a seven year period. The family are of the Islamic faith and are of Ghanaian heritage and culture.
Disclosures of physical assault were made on four separate occasions which eventually resulted in the children being placed on Child Protection Plans. The parents removed their children from mainstream schooling, to provide home and tuition centre education.
Approximately three years later the eldest child disclosed physical assaults by the parents; medical examinations found scars consistent with regular beatings. Subsequently, all the children were placed in foster care and both parents were arrested and convicted of assault, ill-treatment, neglect and abandonment of the children.