Victoria Climbe Essay

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Laming Report (2003) Victoria Climbie Details: In 2000 in London, an eight-year-old girl Victoria Adjo Climbié was tortured and murdered by her guardians. Her death led to a public inquiry and produced major changes in child protection policies in the United Kingdom. Victoria Climbie was born in November 1991 in the Ivory Coast. She died in February 2000 in London aged eight. To escape the poverty of Africa, her parents entrusted her to her great aunt who brought her to Europe. Victoria was tortured to death by that great-aunt, Marie Therese Kouao, and the woman's boyfriend Carl Manning. But Victoria need not have died. Police, doctors, social workers all had contact with her while she was being abused | Carl Manning said that Kouao would strike Victoria on a daily basis with a shoe, a coat hanger and a wooden cooking spoon and would strike her on her toes with a hammer. Victoria spent much of her last days, in the winter of 1999–2000, living and sleeping in a bath in an unheated bathroom, bound hand and foot inside a bin bag, lying in her own urine and faeces. When Victoria was admitted to the North Middlesex Hospital on the evening of 24 February 2000, she was desperately ill. She was bruised, deformed and malnourished. Her temperature was so low it could not be recorded on the hospital’s standard thermometer. Dr Lesley Alsford, the consultant responsible for Victoria’s care on that occasion, said, “I had never seen a case like it before. It is the worst case of child abuse and neglect that I have ever seen.” Victoria’s condition continued to deteriorate. In a desperate attempt to save her life, Victoria was transferred to the paediatric intensive care unit at St Mary’s Hospital Paddington. It was there that, tragically, she died a few hours later, on the afternoon of 25 February 2000. At the post-mortem examination, Dr Carey recorded evidence of no fewer
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