THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN: HOW SOCIETY CAN COUNTER THE PROBLEM OF DRUG
ADDICTED PARENTS

Cunningham Had 'Previous' For Hurting Children And Had Joined Boyd's
Chaotic Household Just 18 Days Before The Boy Died

HE TOOK half a day to die. Brandon Muir, a fortnight shy of his
second birthday, lasted 12 hours after a fatal blow from his mother's
boyfriend. He was to spend his final hours standing, punished,
against a wall; then propped up against a toilet as adults partied;
and, finally, lying cold and alone under a coat on a settee. All this
as his prostitute mother turned tricks to feed her smack habit and
her partner of 18 days drank, smoked hash and had sex with an ex.

The toddler's injuries, doctors later said, were so bad they were
more typical of a car crash than a domestic assault. Brandon's
intestine had been split after it was driven, by massive blunt force,
into the bones of his spine. He died, in agony and after vomiting
brown liquid, of what doctors call acute chemical peritonitis. In
laymen's terms he was poisoned, by his own gastric juices leaking
into his abdomen from his burst gut.

A five-week trial ended last week. It didn't settle exactly how
Brandon, a slight blue-eyed blond who was said to reach for hugs from
almost anyone, came to be hurt. But it did decide who was
responsible: Robert Cunningham, the new boyfriend of the child's
mother, Heather Boyd.

Brandon's killer now faces years in jail - he will be sentenced at
the end of this month - after being found guilty of culpable homicide
at the High Court in Glasgow. Brandon's mother was cleared of
culpable homicide on the judge's direction earlier in the trial.
Boyd, branded "the most hated woman in Scotland" by one tabloid,
defended her parenting. "I was a good mum," she said. "I still am. I
was a normal mum except when I was taking the drugs."

Her son's death was just the latest in a roll call of tiny lives lost
at the hands of addict parents or their associates. The killing of
the two-year-old, hauntingly similar in appearance to the similarly
aged Baby P in London, has sparked independent reviews of child
protection services in Dundee.

Brandon, after all, was in the system, firmly on the radar of social
workers. A case conference was scheduled for two days after his
death. It is understood he was likely to be taken into care amid
concerns about Cunningham, who had "previous" for hurting children
and who had joined Boyd's chaotic household just 18 days before the
boy died. Privately social work experts, none of whom wants to
pre-empt any inquiry with public statements, reckon their colleagues
in Tayside moved pretty quick. Not, of course, as fate had it, quick enough.

Alex Salmond, the First Minister, made clear his views last week:
"The guilt lies with the person who perpetrated the crime," he told
the Scottish Parliament. "It doesn't lie with the social work
department or the police."

As politicians demanded that "this should never happen again", as
scapegoats were sought and as hand-wringing commentators debated the
ethics of allowing junkie mums to keep their babies, frontline child
protection staff were last week bracing themselves for the next
Brandon. Who will he or she be? "Take your pick," said one social
worker. "There are thousands of Brandons to choose from."

Scotland has about 50,000 drug addicts. They, in turn, have about
50,000 children, at least according to research from Glasgow
University. Scotland's children's minister, Adam Ingram, last week
quietly conceded that nobody knows the actual figure for sure.

His "best estimate", he told the BBC, was that some 20,000 youngsters
live in households with substance-abusing parents. Crudely, that is
almost one in every classroom in the country. Few have social
workers. Scotland's at-risk register, the official list of the
nation's most vulnerable youngsters, runs to fewer than 3,000 names.
Most children in drug homes, then, unlike Brandon or even Baby P,
don't get any kind of intense scrutiny from the authorities.

So who is standing up for Scotland's forgotten children, the biggest
victims of the nation's astonishing generation-long heroin epidemic?
And is there any way to reach parents for whom drugs come before kids?

THE lentil soup is simmering on the stove. The staff at Family
Resource Centre, in Ruchazie, Glasgow, always have some vegetable
broth on the go. The big pot is partly a way of showing some of the
centre's clients how easy it is to make cheap and healthy food. It is
also partly a way of making sure some of the mums, dads and children
who drop into the centre get a hot meal.

Mary Glasgow, the social worker who set up the children's charity
Quarriers, is watching some mums with pushchairs tuck into soup and
sandwiches, their children happily playing at their feet.

"I look at the kids in here," she said, thinking of little Brandon
and Boyd. "It is about luck. It is just your luck where you are born.
Luck and opportunity. I feel personally distraught about that baby.
See that young woman, if you could have got her to come here we would
have been able to make a difference. We can't know for sure, of
course. But I think we could have. It is all about raising her
confidence to challenge somebody that is violent and abusive. So she
can say: 'I deserve more than this. My baby deserves better than you.'"

The Quarriers centre, initially nothing more than a flat in one of
Glasgow's bleaker schemes, now a state-of-the-art UKP 1.2m facility,
is regarded as a centre for excellence in dealing with struggling
parents, with or without drug or alcohol problems. Glasgow - the
social worker, not the city - has seen her fair share of little
Brandons. She has also seen a lot of them, thanks to the support on
offer, grow up into healthy teenagers.

Thanks, she reckons, to the tough love their parents get at the
centre. "We have got to support these parents," she said. "But we
have got to challenge them too. We have got to explain to them that
there are things that are not acceptable."

Glasgow tells of a 19-year-old who turned up at the centre one
evening. "She was seven months pregnant and out of her face. She was
just saying, 'Can you help me'. We had a child protection conference
before her baby was born and we said we would offer her support here.
But she smoked heroin in the maternity ward and her baby was taken
into care immediately.

"The young woman had been in care herself and had been a victim of
abuse. She didn't want her baby to go through the same thing. So we
arranged for her to spend time, days with her baby, at the centre.
Eventually she got the baby back and we gave her some pretty intense
support for a year and a half.

"Folk might think that is ridiculous, that it must have cost a
fortune. But I think we have saved a fortune. That young women is now
off drugs, she is working and not getting benefits and her baby is
not in care. All in return for a year and a half's work. You can make
a difference to these folk."

The Quarriers centre, however, is having to turn people away, telling
them it can't help, its services hopelessly oversubscribed. A sister
unit in Barlanark is equally busy, as is an embryonic centre in
Drumchapel. Such parents and children's centres - where the interests
of children come long before those of their parents - are being
rolled out in England. Glasgow, now Quarriers service manager, would
like to see one in "every corner" of the city that shares her name.
"The Government has just got to get to grips with the scale of the
problem it is facing," she said.

Policy-makers are optimistic. The new SNP administration, for the
first time, officially put the needs of addicts' children right at
the heart of its new strategy on drugs, one that stresses recovery
rather than the old focus on managing addicts, usually with heroin
substitute methadone. Cynics who work with drug abusers aren't so
sure. "There is a lot of consensus about how you deal with parents
who abuse substances. We do have some good ways of fixing people"
said one. "But the resources are just not there."

One recovered addict mum, moreover, stressed that getting better was
more painful than staying on drugs. "They always say the good thing
about recovery is that you get your feelings back," the 33-year-old
from Edinburgh said. "They also say that the bad thing about recovery
is getting your feelings back."

Mums and dads with addiction problems love their children like
anyone, she explained. But drugs do strange things to your brain.
They hit the same part of your head as basic needs like breathing or
eating. Or caring for your children. As Boyd said: "I am a good mum.
Except when I am on drugs."

Some addicts, professionals stressed, do somehow manage to muddle
through parenthood. Perhaps, said one social worker, they really
don't all need their own case workers, such is the workload social
work departments are facing.

"We do risk assessments," he said. "We try and get to the worst of
them, the ones who turn up at Primary One not knowing what an apple
is or never having brushed their teeth."

Could Scotland take all the children of addicts into care? Could it
ensure all of them have their own social workers? No and no, say the
frontline workers. Even if the Government somehow came up with the
money needed, they would never find enough of the right kind of
people to look after all those children.

Social workers were this weekend licking their wounds after another
week of bad headlines about children slipping through their net.
Veteran John Stevenson, who has worked for Edinburgh's social work
department for nearly 30 years, remembers the days before heroin hit
Scotland in the early 1980s. There were more social workers then than
now, he reckons. And social workers still have to deal with all the
troubled families that don't have abuse issues.

"There are around 6,000 children in contact with family members who
are addicted to drugs in the Lothians," Stevenson says. "Here in
Edinburgh we have 143 social workers in Children and Families. I want
to give all the politicians a free calculator and ask them to divide
the first figure into the second. It's a bit of a mismatch. "I don't
think people realise the scale of the problem."

THE INNOCENTS

CALEB NESS Murdered aged just two months, in October 2001, by his
brain-damaged father Alexander Ness, who had convictions for violence
and drug dealing. His case sparked a major overhaul of social work
services in Edinburgh.

DANIELLE REID, five, of Inverness, was killed in 2002 by her addict
mother's drug-abusing boyfriend, Lee Gaytor, and dumped in the
Caledonian Canal. She wasn't reported missing for months because her
school was told she had moved to Manchester.

KENNEDY MCFARLANE, three, from Dumfries and Galloway, died in May,
2000, after she was hit by her mother's boyfriend. She had previously
come to the attention of authorities after ingesting drugs.

SCOTT SAUNDERS, of Rutherglen, died of horrific neglect at the hands
of his heroin- addicted carers, mother Cheryl Hanson, 23, and her
boyfriend, Mark Connelly, 29. The 33-month-old toddler was described
as a living skeleton with 150 injuries

DEREK DORAN from East Lothian was found dead in bed in 2005. The
toddler had swallowed methadone, thinking it was a soft drink. Both
his parents were addicts and used the heroin substitute but Derek was
not on the at-risk register.