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CULTURAL BENEFITS 1 -West African / UK slave
trade
One of the Much toted benefits of Racial / Cultural diversity is supposed to bring cultural enrichment, but what are the real achievements? Lately Radio 4 has been having a discussion relating to one of our latest CULTURAL ENRICHMENTS to come from WEST AFRICA - RE INTRODUCTION of child SLAVERY IN TO THE UNITED KINGDOM
Angus Stickler
reports RADIO 4 Yesterday
on this programme we described the shameful trade of West African
children in this country. Sometimes they are bought from their
parents for a pittance. Sometimes their parents actually pay for
them to come here, thinking they'll have a better life. Then they
may be used to collect benefits illegally and effectively treated as
slaves. You might
expect that social workers would be on the lookout for this sort of
thing and doing their best to put a stop to it. Some of them are.
But others have told us that it is not happening. There's a culture
of political correctness which means children's lives are being put
at risk. In a
brightly lit hall, West African churchgoers dressed in their finery,
dancing and singing, celebrate the naming of a new born child. It's
a happy, noisy event - but the smiling face of one woman belies the
fear that she may lose her little boy. She owes money to an agent
who arranged her flight from Nigeria and he wants the child in lieu
of the debt. They are the victims of a child trafficking scam from
West Africa to the UK and Ireland. Where
children are put to work and often suffer beatings and appalling
abuse. But even when these children come to the attention of the
authorities - nothing usually happens. One social worker told me
that political correctness often takes precedence over the welfare
of the child. He raised concerns with a West African colleague about
a child that had been thrashed with a branch and a belt. He was told
it was an acceptable cultural practice. This
social worker has worked in several boroughs in and outside of
London. He told me that in all of them, fear of upsetting West
African colleagues meant abuse continued unchecked. I spoke to three
other social workers in different boroughs who shared his views.
They feared speaking on the record - they'd lose their jobs. But a
Harringey teacher did talk. She says she has lost faith in the
ability of social services to prevent abuse, and that they don't
have confidence of schools in Harringey. She believes fear of being
accused of racism plays a significant part in the problem. "In
my experience there's reason to be worried," she says.
"People have been accused of being racist, when they actually
had concerns for children at heart." This
teacher told us of three separate cases of alleged child abuse -
where children claimed they had been brutally beaten, cut with
knives, even sexually abused. All were returned to their carers. The
social workers I spoke to believe that weak management allows poor
practice to flourish: "This is not challenged because most of
the managers fear having notoriety as racists - poor practice is not
being challenged at all." And even when this social worker made
complaints, he said that that nothing seemed to happen. Some
social workers from the West African community accept that pressures
to fill job vacancies, poor training and bad management has led to
unacceptable working practices. Ama Anane Agyei, a consultant
trainer working for Tower Hamlets Social services said the problem
is widespread, saying that social services were in a mess.
"Just employing social workers as numbers to fill the vacancies
is going to be extremely detrimental to the clients," she says.
"There is no doubt about that. Your blackness alone is not
going to make you effective unless you've got the knowledge and the
skills." Her worst fear is that we see the death of another
African child. Eight-year-old
Victoria Climbie was murdered by her aunt and her lover under the
noses of the authorities in the London Borough of Harringey. All the
signs of abuse were there, but her behaviour was explained away as
normal for a West African girl. The ongoing public inquiry into her
death has heard evidence from a Harringey social worker who claims
that the manager in charge of the case - Carole Baptiste - spent
most of her time during supervisions talking about God and her
experiences as a black woman, instead of dealing with child abuse. Obsession
with religion is a common theme "More and more their are people
with religious fundamentalist views comming into social work who are
very discriminatory and obscure the issue of child abuse. So for
instance if you get a christian fundamentalist from the West African
community, people put up with the kind of prejudice they expound
because they're black - the issues of child abuse become secondary
to the issues of racism." We tried to contact social workers
accused of bad practice - none returned our calls. All the
professionals I spoke to were uneasy about airing their concerns -
they did so through a sense of frustration and because they say they
have the interests of the children at heart. They fear the system is
failing - and that the children deserve better. Click here for Angus Stickler's original report.
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