Baby Finley, the victim of social services...during Covid lockdown
‘Warning signs were ignored’
A DEFENCELESS baby was beaten to death by his drug addict parents when he was failed by social services in lockdown, a damning report found yesterday. In the latest of a grim roll-call of children fatally harmed during Covid restrictions, Finley Boden was found dead on Christmas Day 2020 with 130 injuries – 57 of them fractures.
The ten-month- old should have been one of the most protected children in the local authority area, a safeguarding review concluded.
Yet he was allowed back to the squalid home of Shannon Marsden, 22, and Stephen Boden, 30, in Chesterfield and was dead 39 days later.
Assessments were seriously disrupted by a lack of face-to-face meetings with professionals under social distancing rules, the report found. To compound matters, social workers made only half-hearted attempts to check on Finley after he was returned to his parents’ care.
They ignored warning signs including a bruise on his head and did not challenge Marsden when she was seen apparently buying drugs.
Marsden and Boden were convicted of murder for subjecting the once ‘smiley and chuckling’ baby to ‘unimaginable cruelty’.
Jailing them for life last year, with minimum terms of 27 and 29 years respectively, Mrs Justice Amanda Tipples said they were ‘persuasive and accomplished liars’.
The review stated that, while Finley’s parents were responsible for his death, professional interventions should have protected him.
It said the most significant professional decision was that he should live with his parents, and concluded that the safeguarding environment in which that decision was made had been ‘incrementally weakened by the decisions, actions, circumstances and events which preceded it’.
The unfamiliar working environment of Covid restrictions, with in-person meetings moved online or on the phone, played its part, the report found.
Finley was removed from his parents days after he was born in February 2020, just before the first lockdown, amid concerns about their violent relationship and heavy cannabis use. The family’s social worker recommended a six-month transition back to the parents’ care.
But a family court ordered a much shorter eight-week period instead and rejected a request for mandatory drug testing.
Marsden and Boden were handed the ‘healthy, chubby, happy little boy’ on November 17, 2020, and a few weeks later he was dead.
His injuries included broken bones, burns on his hands – most likely from a cigarette lighter – and cuts in his mouth. Two days before Finley’s death, unemployed Boden sent a text message saying: ‘I want to bounce him off the walls.’
Yesterday’s report by a local safeguarding children partnership found ‘significant shortcomings’.
Myriad systems to detect child cruelty were severely disrupted by Covid restrictions, it said, with facetoface contact with families reduced or ceased. Problems were exacerbated by professionals having to work from home and on screens.
Carol Cammiss of Derbyshire County Council said yesterday: ‘ Despite the significant Covid restrictions placed on our work at the time, we know there were missed opportunities for stronger practice and we apologise for that.’