In modern Scotland, a life like this shames us
Sarah’s story is heartbreaking but the truth is there are far too many children like her. No mother brings a child into the world with the intent of making their life hell, and children can’t choose their parents or pick where they were born.
Why is it that we start to punish them? Why is it that the children are the ones who take the brunt of it?
The ambition for some kids is to just get though the day. They want clean clothes, they want their mum to be sober, their dad not to be violent, they want to have food in the house. Those are the kids that we need to pay attention to.
This is an absolute crisis. If we even have one young girl who has had a life like this in 21st Century Scotland, in 2018, we should be absolutely ashamed of ourselves. This is our shame.
Social work, teachers, police officers all stand up and say they are doing their very best. If that is their very best, it’s just not enough.
We should be keeping families together, we need to coordinate services to do that and we are not. It needs a shake-up.
Professionals need to stop thinking about themselves and think about who they are meant to be helping out, and thinking if we just had more resources, more funding, more mental health therapies it would be great.
Well, what if we stopped it happening in the first place?