‘Social Workers Left Me To Suffer Abuse’

A young man who says social workers left him to suffer at the hands of his brutal and abusive parents has launched a six figure damages claim against Doncaster Council.

From babyhood all the way through to the age of 14, when he ran away from home, the man says he was subjected to almost daily beatings by his parents who kept him and his siblings in squalid conditions.

He told London’s High Court his mother used cutlery to scratch his eyes and he ran away to live on the streets for several months when his father pushed him against a wall and held a knife to his throat.

He told the judge, Mr Justice Eady: “I lived in fear. My mother and father told me that if I told people at school what was happening I would be killed.”

The man, in his 30s, is suing Doncaster Council for hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation, claiming he should have been taken into care while still a baby and not enough was done to protect him from his parents.

Still prey to a catalogue of psychiatric problems, he says his life has been wrecked by social workers’ negligence.

The council denies all blame for the man’s suffering and is fighting the case in a High Court trial expected to last five days.

The man’s counsel, Elizabeth-Anne Gumbel QC, said he had endured “severe physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect from his natural family” almost from the moment he was born.

She added he was just six months old when admitted to hospital after “failing to thrive” and a doctor had advised that he should be placed in foster care and never sent home again.

However, after a stint with fosterers, he was returned to the “appalling conditions” of his family home in November 1977 when the abuse continued, Miss Gumbel told the judge.

In May 1979 he was back in hospital with severe scalding on his body and, although doctors suspected his injuries were “non-accidental”, that could not be proved. He was placed on the “at risk” register, but was again returned home, where he “continued to be severely mistreated and abused by both his mother and father,” said Miss Gumbel.

She said that after he ran away in 1990 he was finally taken into care by the council after he was tracked down.

Later he made a suicide attempt and was diagnosed with severe psychiatric problems.

Miss Gumbel said he should have been taken into care in 1977 and accused social workers of “ignoring obvious signs of abuse” and failing to monitor his progress in his parents’ home.

She said putting him on the “at risk” register was “of no help whatsoever if he was placed in the home from where the risk came and was not visited or monitored”.

Miss Gumbel added: “The council’s records show that the plight of the claimant was known to the defendant’s social workers from a few weeks after birth. The claimant was removed from his family and then returned without proper investigation or follow up.

“It was not until the claimant was 14 years old that he was permanently removed from the home.”

The council’s barrister, Catherine Foster, put to the man that he had been a disruptive child at home and at school and his account of abuse at his parents’ hands was “somewhat distorted”.

Reacting angrily, the man asked the barrister: “How would you deal with it if you had been thrown against a wall at knifepoint by your father, told you are ugly and that you will never succeed. How would you feel?”

When Ms Foster described his treatment as “nasty”, the man said he had been kept by his parents in “filthy” conditions. He added: “Beating is nothing nasty, that’s abuse. My mother put forks and knives in my eyes and my father beat me every day. The school used to check me for nits and change my clothes because I was so dirty.”

The man agreed he had been a disruptive schoolboy, but said that was a direct result of the abuse he was suffering every day at home.

The hearing continues.