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Khyra Ishaq: Five Months at Home (Case File)

On the morning of 17 May 2008, an ambulance was called to a house in Handsworth, Birmingham. Paramedics found seven-year-old Khyra Ishaq dead. She weighed thirty-seven pounds, and the Court of Appeal later noted that the house held an abundance of good, wholesome food. Five months earlier she had been a pupil with a perfect attendance record. In December 2007 her school reported that she had been taking food. That same month her mother wrote to say she would educate her at home.

This is the case file on Khyra Ishaq. I follow how the one institution that saw her every day dropped out of her life, and how a school's concern about food went into a referral that was inaccurately recorded and then lost. I also cover the serious case review, the first in England to be published in full. It found that some agencies lost sight of the child, and that home education law gave local authorities no power to monitor or inspect. I cover the two prosecutions and sentences, the 2011 Court of Appeal judgment, and Angela Gordon's release in 2017. I say plainly where the record runs out, including the outcome of the social workers' disciplinary and regulatory processes.

I also draw on more than fourteen years of social work practice to look at six areas, and end with questions for professionals.

Chapters (approximate):

• Cold open: the 999 call
• The family before Junaid Abuhamza
• December 2007: the food, the letter, the school gap
• Home education and the doorstep problem
• The serious case review
• What happened to the professionals
• The trials, the pleas and the sentences
• The Court of Appeal and release
• Six strands for professionals
• Questions to take back to your practice

Content note: The episode discusses the starvation and death of a child. The script deliberately avoids a detailed account of what the children went through, in line with the court's own approach.

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In the spring of 2002, a Florida state worker went looking for a four-year-old girl in a foster home. She wasn't there. The woman caring for her said a stranger claiming to work for the state had taken her away for an evaluation, fifteen months earlier. In that time the Department of Children and Families had kept paying for her care, and one court report said she was safe in her caretaker's home.

This is the case file on Rilya Wilson. I follow the case from her removal as a baby to her placement with a caregiver whose own record the agency never uncovered, then to the caseworker whose visits stopped while her paperwork continued. I cover the 2013 conviction of Geralyn Graham, and I say plainly what the court record leaves unresolved: Rilya's body has never been found, and no court has ruled on what happened to her.

I also draw on more than fourteen years of social work practice to look at six areas: the gap between records and reality, caseworker caseloads, background checks that can't see a person using dozens of names, the money that kept flowing, and what accountability looks like when a child is never found. The episode ends with six questions for professionals.

Chapters (approximate):

• Cold open: the visit that found nobody
• Rilya's early life and the fragmented family
• The caregiver the agency didn't check
• The caseworker and the fifteen months
• How the disappearance came to light
• The investigation, the charges and the trial
• What the court record does and doesn't establish
• Six strands for professionals
• Questions to take back to your practice

Content note: The episode discusses the abuse and death of a child. The script deliberately leaves out some details from the court record. Discretion advised

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Nobody Looked: The Jeffrey Baldwin Case

In 1998, a Toronto children's aid society approved a grandmother and her husband as legal guardians of four small children. The agency held a file on the woman that went back almost thirty years. It held a conviction for assaulting her own five-month-old daughter, and records on the man she lived with, who had beaten two of her other children into hospital. Nobody checked any of it.

Four years later, five-year-old Jeffrey Baldwin was dead. He weighed twenty-one pounds, about what he weighed on his first birthday.

This episode follows the case from the agency's early files to the criminal trial and the 2013 coroner's inquest. It covers the decisions that put Jeffrey in that house and the warnings that went nowhere. It also covers what the jury recommended, and how much of it has been done.

In this episode:

• How a grandmother's persistent concern was recorded in the file as "a family strength"
• Why criminal record checks were run on the parents losing the children, and never on the grandparents gaining them
• The caseworker's inquest testimony: "We get what we get"
• Life inside the house, and the six adults who did not speak up
• The trial, the second-degree murder convictions and the appeals
• The inquest: 103 recommendations and the slow rollout of CPIN, Ontario's shared information system
• Six practice strands for professionals: kinship care assessment, file closure at placement, information systems, strengths-based practice without verification, bystanders, and the invisible pre-school child
• Questions for anyone working with children and families

Content note: this episode describes severe child neglect and abuse, including starvation and confinement. Listener discretion is advised.

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Sources include the Abell independent review of the Catholic Children's Aid Society of Toronto, coverage of the trial and inquest by CBC, Global News, CTV and the Globe and Mail, and Ontario government service documents on CPIN.