Black, Asian and Mixed heritage children “invisible”, safeguarding report finds

A new child safeguarding report has revealed that there was no acknowledgment of race or racism when it came to the reviews of 53 Black, Asian and Mixed heritage children who died or were harmed which was deeply concerning.

A new child safeguarding report has revealed that there is “significant silence” in talking about race and racism leaving the needs of Black, Asian and Mixed heritage children “invisible.”

The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel published its report about 53 children from Black, Asian and Mixed Heritage backgrounds who died or were seriously harmed between January 2022 and March 2024.

The review aimed to understand the how agencies helped to protect children from these specific ethnic backgrounds of which 27 of them died as a result of ‘abuse, including sexual abuse, fatal assault, and neglect’.

The death of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié who was murdered by her guardians and died of 128 injuries in 2005, highlighted the importance of considering the impact of racial bias and how it can undermine the effectiveness of public agencies to protect Black children, the report said.

But the panel found that the severe lack of acknowledgement of racism left the needs of Black, Asian and Mixed heritage, children “invisible” with many local areas “failing to acknowledge” the impact.

Speaking to the Mirror, panel lead for the report Jahnine Davis said that race and racism had not been explored in the reviews and furthermore, of the 53 children’s safeguarding reviews they looked, ‘not a single quote’ from any of the kids could be found.

Jahnine said: “Usually when we publish reports, they’ll be a quote or something linked to what a child has said and we couldn’t find that in any of the reviews. Out of the 53 reviews we read, we couldn’t see child voice. Then I said, we need to call this report silent.

“Reviews do talk about bias, in some they spoke about gender bias, but you can talk about bias but it seems when we talk about racial bias, then we see silence. Why is that?.

“What we can see for Black children is that there is hyper-visibility when being perceived or being responded to by our various services when you are involved in criminality or assumed to be involved in criminality.

“But yet we don’t see this hyper-invisibilisation, not being seen or not being considered when thinking about your inherent vulnerability to the risks which are posed to you and you being a victim of that. We have to do more about that.”

The report found that there were several examples about girls from Asian and Mixed Asian Heritages who had revealed they had been sexually abused but that these appeared to have been “disregarded as untrue or were not carefully followed up.”

But Jahnine added that the lack of acknowledgement of race or racism within the reviews meant that it was difficult to assess whether race or racism did play a part in the harm or death of the children who died over the 2 years and three months.

She said: “We were unable to explore the full picture. We weren’t able to assure ourselves that there had been that full understanding from whether or not, racism was a factor.

“Where families have said, ‘we feel that racism is impacting on how we’re being treated or how this child is being treated’, we would see in a review it would just say, ‘they could see no evidence of that’, but they wouldn’t provide evidence of how they justified that decision.

“And that’s why we kept on going back to say, ‘[the racism] is silent’.”

This report concluded that changes in safeguarding practice and policy needed to be secured in order protect children of Asian, Black and Mixed Heritage backgrounds from being harmed both inside and outside their families.

But overall, Jahnine says that the picture was “deeply concerning” and that there was more work to do to prevent children from coming to harm.

She said: “The findings are deeply concerning. It’s worrying. This report identified this discomfort or the worry of being seen as being racist. The focus should not be the discomfort when it comes to talking to issues about race.

“The core thing which should always be at the forefront is that this is about safeguarding children.”