Nannies can help fix domestic abuse

I note from the report in The Wokingham Paper that the new leadership at Wokingham Borough Council is to focus on the prevention of domestic abuse as its priority.

There are also new proposals for a national strategy to tackle this problem – to be adopted, if agreed, in September.

Proposals for harsher punishments, and longer prison sentences for abusers, will not help to solve the problem – because people who neglect and abuse their children do so because they were neglected and abused by their parents – who were neglected and abused by theirs!

They can’t deliver childcare – because they don’t know what childcare is!

I think that such people should be provided with specially trained resident nannies. This idea is already in operation, to an extent, by the excellent charity, Home Start. They provide trained volunteers – who are, themselves, experienced parents – to help struggling families with at least one child under the age of five.

I am thinking of full-time resident nannies for those families with the greatest degree of mental illness and inadequacy.

The ‘Baby P’ case would never have happened if Tracey Connelly had been thus supervised all the time.

I can already hear the cries of horror at the costs involved. But would it cost more? The aim is not the short-term one of making life easy for inadequate families, but is the long-term one of breaking the cycle of abuse in the next generation.

Our current system of having social workers visiting and making reports, of returning mentally ill mothers to hospital when they break down under stress, of taking their children into care, and of sending abusers to prison – doesn’t work in the best interests of the children, but does cost a lot of money!

Trained resident nannies would demonstrate excellent childcare to those who have never had it, and, no doubt, the nannies would find themselves having to nanny the parents, as well as the children! We have an example with our own members – both - ladies who suffered very severe postnatal depression.

One had a brilliant nanny – paid for by her husband’s employer. Her boys are now both hard-working adults – successfully raising families of their own.

The other did not get help with her infant son – who now spends his adult life as an unemployable heroin addict!

The nannies are not Mary Poppins! There is no magic in mental health, but Wokingham Borough Council should try out this idea. It works!