No one else must be let down like Madison
IT’S THE smile that gets you. Two-year-old Madison Horn, all blonde hair and cheeky innocence, beaming happily at the camera, her whole life ahead of her. Her last few moments on earth must have been terrifying. Kevin Park, her mother’s boyfriend, battered her head off a wall. He punched her and stamped on her. He is believed to have used a broken pool cue during the assault that killed her.
This week’s conviction, in which Park was jailed for life, was an ending of sorts. Yet it also raises many disturbing questions. Little Madison may only have been alive for two short years, yet she had three ‘fathers’ – men who drifted in and out of the life of her 22year- old mother Anne Marie White, whose home life appears to have been so chaotic that it has now emerged that the man registered on Madison’s birth certificate was not her father.
With so little stability at home, you cannot help but wonder what sort of life Madison would have had, if she had lived. Would she have followed a similar pattern – getting pregnant while still in her teens, unable to provide stability to her own young family?
Social workers in Fife had no involvement after Park moved in with Miss White – this despite the fact that he was wearing an electronic tag at the time of the murder after being spared jail for a brutal assault on a former partner. Following Park’s conviction, Fife Council announced a significant case review to examine if Madison could have been better protected.
The answer to that question, of course, is yes. The state provides so many band-aid fixes for poorer families – free prescriptions, free school meals – yet when it really mattered, when a child’s life was at stake, she was let down. She was left alone with a violent man, nobody intervened, and now she is dead.
Surely, when it comes to our most vulnerable children, we can do better.