Until the middle of last week, I
don’t think I had ever heard of the little French town of Crepy-en-Valois.
This small town is situated just 40 miles outside of Paris. It has a population
of around 15,000 people. Having lived in a small town before, I know such towns
can be a little like the metaphorical Peyton Place (if you were born after
1969, ask you parents what this means). It was J who brought this small town to
my attention. She taught English (as part of her French degree) there from 1989
and still has friends made there on social media. Last week, the Crepy Facebook
site posted that they were closing their Covid vaccination centre due to having
run out of supplies, and wanting to conserve the remaining stock so as to give
the second vaccination as per Pfizer and World Health Organisation guidelines.
Of course, the supply of vaccines
was much in the news last week. It worries me, and I know from many of the
meetings I attended last week, other people are concerned too. Many of those people
are senior NHS managers and leaders. However, it wasn’t the supply of vaccines
that rose to the surface of my mind when I was thinking about this week’s blog.
It was something else, that came from reading up on that little French town. And
it was something I had forgotten all about.
In 1982, the second deadliest
road accident in France’s history occurred. The deadliest was of course, the terrorist
lorry attack in 2006 on Bastille Day in Nice. That night 86 people were killed
and some 458 were injured after a lorry was deliberately driven at them by
Mohamed Lahouairj-Bouhel. The 1982 road accident saw 55 people lose their lives,
46 of whom were young children. All were from Crepy-en-Valois. Most died from a
fire that engulfed the coach in which they were travelling, and from which they
were unable to escape.
The suffering of children was
also something of a focus in a couple of the meetings I was in last week. Whilst
the UK has one of the highest Covid death rates per million of population, children’s
deaths from Covid are very rare and have primarily occurred where the child has
a serious underlying health problem. We know from much research that children
are much less likely to become infected and if they do, are more likely to have
less severe symptoms. However, it is the harm that children may be experiencing
as a consequence of the restrictions and political decisions taken to deal with
the pandemic that concerns me, and I’m sure many others too.
I attended a safeguarding meeting
last week, where the number of children found to be at risk was almost 50%
higher than in the previous year. There are other reports of the risks children
have been facing as a result of schools being closed. In Ofsted’s annual report,
published last December, they noted that teachers were often the first to be
able to spot signs of abuse or neglect. Staying at home has meant many children
became invisible to teachers and other trusted adults, and as such may well
have suffered unseen abuse and neglect. Prior to the pandemic, about 20% of
safeguarding notifications came from schools and early year settings. Sadly,
for some children, schools provide the only respite they get from the abuse they
experience at home.
The pandemic has left many of these
children with nowhere to go to escape the trauma of abuse. Childline, the
children’ charity helpline, has seen a threefold increase in the number of
counselling sessions focussed upon child sexual abuse with the family. Some
children said that as a consequence of having to spend more time with their abuser,
they had been sexually abused more often during the [first] lockdown. The NSPCC
has reported that it has seen a rise of 23% since the pandemic started of calls
from adults worried about sex abuse occurring in the home. A number of the reports
from children - about a quarter of the calls to Childline - were about abuse
that happened recently, and a further 20% talked about abuse that had been
going on for at least a year. Unsurprisingly, but very concerning nevertheless,
were the calls from children and young people who were spending more time on their
own; not having contact with friends meant that they experienced distressing
memories of previous abuse. About a third of callers talked about sexual abuse
that had occurred over a year ago, and for some children and young people this was
the first time they had told anyone about it. These are the ‘hidden harms’ of
the pandemic.
Whilst the evidence shows that with
the right support, at the right time, children and young people can recover
after experiencing the trauma of sexual abuse, some survivors of childhood
sexual abuse do not get this support and expert help. In such cases, the impact
of abuse in earlier life will be there and can manifest itself in many
different way during a person’s life (see here for examples). In the context of
the pandemic that worries me. The Office for National Statistics notes that 1
in 4 women and 1 in 6 men have experienced some form of abuse before they were
16 years old. These are statistics, but they are also the people we may well be
working alongside each day. I worry as the trauma that many health and social
care workers are experiencing in dealing with the pandemic now is, in itself, a
retraumatising environment and context.
My last meeting of the week was
one where I joined other Non-Executive Directors to explore our duty of care to
colleagues working in our health and care services. It was a very interesting and
important debate – and there was much acknowledgement of the importance of
embracing a trauma-informed approach to both the care of our patients and those
with whom we work. If you don’t know what that is, you can find out more here –
and whether it’s a Crepy-en-Valois coach crash, Aberfan disaster, child sex
abuse or the Covid pandemic we might be facing in the future, we should all
strive to build a trauma-informed society (and in the case of the NHS) a trauma-informed
workforce.
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