I remember reading about Victoria Climbié on a visit to England, when
something about the case was still in the news.  The full account of why
this foundation exists is in the report of the Public Inquiry, two mouse
clicks from the Foundation's starting page, into the circumstances around
her death after suffering massive abuse by a relative who was entrusted with
Victoria's care by her parents.  They accepted the chance for Victoria to
move from her family's home in the Ivory Coast, to Europe for an education
in the care of this relative.  The foundation's purpose is to make sure that
children who are in danger, are actually removed from the care of whoever is
endangering them.  It is not a foundation that is inherently sceptical to
the removal of endangered children.

Once I started reading Victoria's story in the Report, I was unable to stop
until I got to the very end.  If anyone has any doubt that Children's
Protective Services in the UK sometimes make errors of judgment, those
doubts should be erased after having read this document.  Victoria's story,
which I bet would have shocked Charles Dickens, is chapter 3 of the report,
which then goes on in 12 subsequent chapters to enumerate the specific
failures of five social service offices in the various districts in which
she lived, two hospitals and several medical practices, at least one health
visitor, and three different police child protection teams.  All this took
place over a period of ten months, from when she entered the UK, until her
death.

All of these agencies or people had come into direct contact with Victoria
in circumstances that made it abundantly clear that she was being
intentionally harmed, and yet nothing was ever done to ensure her physical
safety.  It is the agencies' own documentation that forms the basis for the
conclusions of the inquiry.  The private carers who also had good reason to
suspect she was not being cared for adequately, are not the focus of the
inquiry, since the government needed to do its own housecleaning before
telling anyone else what standards to keep to.  They are, however, all
mentioned in chronological order in the story of Victoria's life in the UK.


The only way this relates to breastfeeding is that marginalized groups do
not enjoy the same kind of protection from abuses of power as members of
what is at any given time defined as mainstream in a culture.  In many
industrialized countries, women who breastfeed beyond what the agency
caseworker personally finds appropriate may be separated from their children
and the breastfeeding itself labeled as the problem.  This applies in
particular to breastfeeding women who are young, poor, single, immigrants or
suspected of some kind of unacceptable behavior like street drug use, and it
is most noticeable in cultures where distance to one's children is
encouraged from an early age and breastfeeding is not the norm.  The mothers
do not need to have been convicted, only suspected.  There may be
overreaction by protective services, and there may be complete failure to
respond at all.  Both are bad.  What we need are protective services that
really do respect what children need, regardless of whatever cultural
baggage the child's family or the protective agency is carrying with them.  

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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