This week, a group of men were convicted for grooming girls in Oxfordshire. The crimes they committed are disgusting enough. What concerns us is that one of the girls – who has very eloquently given her story to the media repeatedly asked her local social services for help as well as the police. Her mother also ‘begged’ for help. The child who was adopted, said that nobody listened, they simply passed the buck until it was too late. This was not a case of asking for help once or twice, but several times. The girl and her mother had no support and knew they needed it. Why couldn’t they fix it themselves you ask? Well if things were that easy we’d all fix our own problems and there would be no need for law enforcers, councils, social workers and the rest. Life is a series of events and in this case they got out of hand.

Oxford is of course a popular place for Cameron and his ilk. Many of them (and many Labour politicians) studied there. But now, strangely there is no reaction from a government that wants to do better for children. We expected the usual deathly silence from Edward Timpson (Edward when are you going to talk to me?) but after the jaw-jaw of the government and how it cares about families and vulnerable families at that, where is the interest?

This is a classic example of what we at ABW have repeatedly identified: the lack of support for children and parents in vulnerable situations. This might seem like an isolated case but it really is part of a bigger picture where children in danger, either in families or in care, are given very little consideration. And if they are adopted, the parents get no support. It would be far too assumptive to say the council ignored the pleas of the girl’s mother because she was adopted. But it’s not wrong to say that adoptive parents are ignored.

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