By Alison

A member of our community forums has brought to our attention a policy known as CRAM (Child Assessment Risk Matrix) which was developed by the Metropolitan Police Service in the wake of the Baby P case. Naturally, they were aided and abetted in their efforts to predict the essentially unpredictable by the usual suspects, including the NSPCC and Barnardos, who have a vested interest in the child abuse industry.

This article, published on the Community Care website, appears to be full of “wisdom”  (much of which is based on erroneous information and assumptions) by a bunch of “professionals” whose own track record in protecting children in their care can hardly be described as exemplary. It is also based on false information about the incidence of child abuse perpetrated against home educated children; for as AHEd has shown, home educated children are less likely to suffer abuse than those who go to school (and that’s not even counting the sanctioned school based abuse known as bullying, which is thought to claim the lives of 16 children every year).

But here we have it in black and white from so called experts: “home educated” is listed as a risk factor along with “disability”, “privately fostered”, “substance abuse” and “sexualised bahaviour”.  Why “home educated” and “privately fostered” should both be highlighted in red is not entirely clear, but it would suggest to the lay observer that they must both be activities which are near the top of the hit list for planned annihilation by the state.

As has been said on the forums, the inclusion of “home educated” as an alleged risk factor is:

…utterly shocking and completely without foundation (unless you are taken in by Badman’s fabricated stats and Ballsian fantasy).

For the record, it has been demonstrated beyond all doubt by AHEd that home educated children are less likely to suffer abuse than those who go to school. Not to mention all the  police officers, social workers, teachers, youth workers and other ‘vetted’ professionals who have abused their positions to groom, exploit and harm children in their care.

On another forum thread we see that the Freedom in Education under Threat blog has covered the story, observing that

… those made up statistics of Mr Badman’s have been doing the rounds then. Whosoever is behind this lovely little chart is clearly suffering from a particularly bad case of FSBP (flawed statistic based policy).

Meanwhile, a lurking forum member has been prompted by this “latest example of propaganda fuelled evidence  fabrication” to submit a Freedom of Information  request to the Met requesting details of the evidence base used to justify including “disability”, “home educated” and “privately fostered” in its risk assessment matrix.  Our member wishes to ascertain the evidence sources(s), but assumes (like the rest of us) that, in the case of “home educated”, its inclusion was based on the false/falsified statistics contained within Badman’s discredited (and roundly rejected) report of his so called independent review of elective home education in England.

Quite possibly, however, previous false allegations which were made by the London Safeguarding Network (LSN), and which were widely circulated (presumably in order to incite hatred against home educators during the Badman review process), may have played no little part in perpetuating the slur which conned the CRAM creators.  This forum thread provides the context and background for the creation and dissemination of what amounted to a web of lies and deceit on the part of the LSN, whose spokesperson failed to provide AHEd with a satisfactory explanation for having claimed,  in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, that home educated children were at disproportionate risk of abuse.

According to AHEd, the LSN spokesperson:

…didn’t actually hold any information about specific cases. It was not that she had concerns about confidentiality. She appears to assert that she did not have the details at all. Further, she appears not to have been able to give the names of the professionals who provided her with the information that there were serious child protection issues or who might actually know of the details of these cases. Also any details on this matter are missing from the minutes of the meeting in which they were supposedly mentioned.

And as AHEd also noted at the time:

…the board wrote in an official, professional document, that they are aware of serious cases that caused concern about harm to children comparable to high profile new stories of child abuse and murder and as a result of which they insisted the law should be changed to investigate our families when, in fact, they were not aware of any such cases but had embarked on a search to find some as a result of which, they did not find any cases?

All a bit dodgy or what?

Let’s wait and see how the Met responds / fails to answer the questions.