Last week a colleague was quizzed by a friend as to why it had not been reported in the JEP that the ‘mutilated bodies of five children’ had been found at the site of the latest investigations. ‘I had to read it on the website of an Australian paper,’ the indignant friend had said. ‘Why won’t the JEP print that?’
The answer in this instance, of course, was that the headline was simply not true – but by then the ‘new finds’ had been posted far and wide around the world.
On the other hand, some weeks ago one of the tabloids came up with a story that children from Birmingham had been sent here and their whereabouts were unknown. Investigations were done and it appeared, at the time, to be untrue.
This week, however, it appears that Birmingham council had sent children here to be placed in care and that they may not have been the only UK authority to do so.
Without in any way diminishing Jersey’s particular, peculiar and horrific part in all this, the fact that Birmingham council did not even know whether it had lost any children points, more than anything else, towards the prevailing attitude held towards children – especially those requiring special care – as a nuisance.
Jersey did not have the monopoly on neglecting vulnerable children.
