A teenage boy who has been accused of multiple rapes was housed in Airbnbs by a local authority after regulated accommodation providers said it would be too risky for them to house him.
Airbnbs and other temporary accommodation have been deployed because no secure placement can be found anywhere in England that is prepared to accommodate the child, who self-harms, makes weapons, assaults staff members, damages property and has been taken to hospital after expressing suicidal thoughts. He has been arrested on numerous occasions.
At a hearing in the high court last week, family judge Mrs Justice Lieven said she found it “absolutely astonishing” that Coventry council had seen fit to place the vulnerable 16-year-old in a series of unregulated placements all around the country over the last 12 months, from which he has frequently absconded. He was later placed in an unregulated children’s home.
She added that he posed “a palpable risk to women and girls” after police officers decided to take no further action following three accusations of rape. Since August, when he arrived at his current placement, the child has been reported to police more than 100 times and has gone missing 13 times from his children’s home. He has admitted to carrying a knife and a machete.
Concerned that the boy was being drawn into organised crime, the judge accused Coventry children’s services of a “lackadaisical” attitude to his care, and said she felt “wholly unconvinced” that social workers were doing all they could to keep the public and the child himself safe.
The boy’s court-appointed guardian said: “It is now apparent that the current placement has been struggling with even the most basic containment for some time with a recent significant escalation.” She deplored the fact that staff at his children’s home allowed him to smoke cannabis on the property.
In a letter submitted to the court, one police officer who has visited the child multiple times noted that “he is always vaping or smoking tobacco” when he met him in the community. Having challenged the children’s home staff as to how the child was able to buy these products, as he is always accompanied, the officer observed: “[They] have no reasonable answer.” The same officer wrote how the boy is “very open about the use of [cannabis] and … smokes it in the house and bedroom in an open manner … The on-site care staff are aware and never challenge him”.
His cannabis use is thought to have contributed to a violent assault last weekend, which resulted in a police officer being hospitalised. On being arrested, the boy explained to the officer that “he had smoked a substantial amount of cannabis in front of the staff and in his bedroom with no challenges met from them”.
The court heard that the boy’s allocated social worker was not informed of this serious assault until several days later. As a result, a member of staff at the children’s home has been suspended.
Criticising the children’s home provider as “hopeless” and the local authority as “passive” in its efforts to secure safe care for the boy, the judge said: “If the local authority had discharged its responsibilities properly he would not have been taking cannabis or assaulting a police officer.”
The court was told the child was receiving no therapeutic support and no education, and there was no secure and regulated placement on offer which would offer both.
The boy is subject to a deprivation of liberty order, in which a local authority can ask the high court for permission to deprive a child of their liberty for their own protection. This occurs when they do not meet the criteria to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. A deprivation of liberty order allows a child in an unregistered placement – because no secure registered placement is available – to be subject to restrictions on their liberty.
Lieven said depriving a child of liberty in this situation could be seen as “a legal sticking plaster” for a “wholly unacceptable” standard of care.
Deprivation of liberty orders are now being sought in such numbers that judges have no time to write judgments explaining their reasons for making them, or describing the plight of children whose lives they oversee, she observed.
This type of order, the judge said, is “normalising the wholly unacceptable” standard of care that many of these extremely vulnerable children now receive while in the care of their local authority.
