Pink Tape

a blog from the family bar

Damn your eyes you contemptible scoundrel!

You know those times when checking the to-do list doesn’t calm you down? That. So in lieu of a calm considered post (or even in lieu of a lengthy and time consuming but ill considered ranty post) please accept the following offerings: Contempt: Don’t be in it to win it. You’d think that journalists that [...]

Protecting All Children – jus’ like that

Jill Kirby, Director of the Centre for Policy Studies writes a piece in the Opinion section of Wednesday’s Times entitled ‘It’s not hard to spot the children really at risk’. Self evidently it is a little harder than we would like to think or we wouldn’t have had to add Baby P to a long list of other [...]

Rise in Child Abuse Calls

The NSPCC has seen a dramatic increase in calls about suspected child abuse since Baby P – referrals from the NSPCC to the police or social services are up by a third in two years. I was astonished to read that between April 2008 and March 2009 the NSPCC passed on 11,243 suspected child protection [...]

Fear or Favour

Camilla Cavendish writes an excellent article about (amongst other things) the tendency towards back-covering in child protection and the consequent fear of professionals that many good parents now have. She is right – I am anxious each time I take my son to the GP for a routine appointment that whatever minor knock or scrape he may [...]

Laming Report Published

Lord Laming’s Report in the wake of the Baby P tragedy was published this week. It can be found here. Of particular relevance to family lawyers Lord Laming recommends an urgent review of the £4,000 fees for the issue of care proceedings and that steps should be taken to reduce the average case length in [...]

Baby P Sacking Legal Actions Commence

Sharon Shoesmith has commenced not one but two legal actions in connection with her dismissal from Haringey over the Baby P case – judicial review and employment tribunal, the Guardian reports.

Making a meal of it

Myself and another legal rep were a little taken aback to be told recently that we were ‘making a meal of it’, ‘it’ being the alleged assaults by a father upon his children by blows to the head. Not – apparently - a child protection concern because the kids, now just in double digits, don’t present as frightened. Well [...]

Violence Begets Violence

I’m saddened by the number of comments on posts relating to Baby P I have moderated which advocate doing serious physical violence or killing the perpetrators of abuse. Some are quite graphic. I’m not going to publish them because I don’t think it helps anybody, it disrespects the victims of violent crime and it makes [...]

Standard Stuff

On the way back through Paddington at the end of a day in the High Court yesterday  I was not astonished to see a rather distasteful piece fronting up the Evening Standard. From reading the information emblazoned across the front page one might reasonably have formed the view that Ms Shoesmith, formerly of Haringey had personally and forcibly snatched a [...]

The Baby P Effect

An interesting article in the Independent about the so called ‘Baby P Effect’, particularly the stats showing an increase in applications this month compared to last November – considering the dip in the meanwhile apparently as a result of the increased fees this appears to be a direct result of an increase in defensive / [...]

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  • About

    A blog in which I ricochet from too serious to too flippant, and alternate between a bit clever, a bit interesting and a bit ranty: Pink Tape neatly functions as both a blog about family law and a therapeutic escape valve for me. >>more




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