Why I fear political correctness helped kill little Elsie

WIcKeDness comes in all shapes and sizes. This week, it comes in the guise of a puckish 31- year- old ex- fitness instructor, Matthew scullyHicks, who beat his 18- month- old adopted daughter, elsie, to death.

Following months of abuse, he finally killed the little girl by violently shaking her and banging her head on a hard surface.

Incredibly, just 13 days earlier he and his husband, craig, had finalised the adoption papers. They were planning a party for elsie to celebrate. scully-Hicks had even taken her to Marks & spencer earlier that afternoon to choose an outfit.

Little elsie did not have the best start in life. Her mother was a drug user and she was taken into care by social services five days after her birth.

This new beginning ought to have been a happy time for her. In reality, it was an agonising start to months of unimaginable abuse.

ELsIe,

at the time of her death, exhibited injuries ‘similar to those caused by a car crash’. she had bleeding to three parts of her brain, haemorrhages behind both eyes, and fractures to her leg, skull and three of her ribs.

Prior to that, she had been treated for a severe fall and had recently developed a squint in her left eye. she had also suffered a cardiac arrest.

Yet despite repeated trips to the GP and hospital and visits from social services, her desperate condition was not picked up. One social worker even went so far as to comment that elsie and her new father were making ‘ good eye contact’.

This was the same father who was heard by neighbours screaming repeatedly, ‘shut the f*** up’ and who, in increasingly frantic text messages to husband craig, openly described the child as a ‘psycho’, a ‘pain in the ass’, and ‘satan dressed up in a baby grow’.

That in itself would make this a truly heartbreaking story. But when it transpires that, far from being alone in the world, elsie had a loving family who not only had remained in contact throughout her time in foster care, but also desperately wanted to look after her themselves, it becomes unbearable.

elsie’s biological grandmother tried to adopt her granddaughter, but was turned down by social services on the grounds that she ‘would struggle to cope’.

sometimes, of course, this is a fair judgment. But in elsie’s case it seems bitterly ironic. Because whatever impediments elsie’s grandmother may have faced to looking after her daughter’s child, she would truly have had to be a monster to outdo scully-Hicks.

This was a young man who clearly could not cope with the most basic toddler behaviour. The ‘nightmare’ he describes in his text messages — elsie waking at regular intervals during the night, refusing to eat, crying at bedtime, becoming fractious in the evenings — are things that all children of that age do.

no one would deny it’s a challenge — especially if it’s your first child. not for nothing do we talk of the ‘terrible twos’. But the idea that elsie’s flesh and blood, her own grandmother, would have handled her any worse than this relative stranger is simply absurd.

But even that is not the worst of it. Because the real reason elsie was taken from her birth family and given to the scully-Hickses is the worst one of all: political correctness.

According to a whistleblower, a social worker with 30 years’ experience who was part of the child Protection team at elsie’s local authority, the scully-Hickses may not have been vigorously vetted or challenged about elsie’s injuries because it seemed such an attractive idea to place the child with a gay couple.

Don’t get me wrong: I do not believe sexuality matters one jot when it comes to being a good parent. But in matters of adoption, the most important thing is being utterly scrupulous about putting the interests of the child first.

SOcIAL

workers have, on many past occasions, failed to do this because they are encouraged to see their job not just as child protection, but also as righting social ‘wrongs’.

so it can be the case that children won’t be placed with a couple where the ethnic background is different, or tough questions won’t be asked about certain communities. It happened with the child sex grooming cases in Rotherham, where social workers were reluctant to conceive of Muslim men abusing white girls; and it happened in Haringey with Victoria climbie where racial sensitivities were a factor.

Yesterday, scully-Hicks began a life sentence for the murder of little elsie. But he is not the only one who should have this horrible crime on their conscience.

elsie’s other adoptive father, craig scully-Hicks, failed to spot signs of the situation unravelling. social workers may have allowed themselves to be blinded by preconceptions.

Finally, there’s a system so mired in mistaken assumptions and weighed down by political correctness, it actually harms the very people it aims to protect.