Children in Care?

We are all responsible, for children ’In Care.’
Removed from home, taken away from danger there.
Why do we send children, away from their place?
So many unknowns, she will have to face.
Remove the danger; not hard to make a case.
The child is innocent, but is punished, never the less.
At sixteen, sent to many, different privately run houses;
Living with psychotic, troubled, youngsters.
Often, far from home, with no friends, or familiar faces.
We are blind, to this National disgrace.
Young people with insufficient support,
Are placed in peril, privately bought.
Hundreds go missing, just melt away,
In horrid conditions, they couldn’t stay.
’Care in the Comunity, ’ a political jingle
Whilst the vulnerable young, with sick villains mingle.
On drugs, self-harming, surviving this way,
Exploited by criminals, most in crime they’ll stay.
Caught up in prostitution, or begging in the streets,
Their future lives are horribly bleak.
We appear untroubled yet we feel the cost,
It’s a huge financial and human loss.
We see deterioration in mental and physical growth,
Yet to save the children we are loath.
We could, keep the children, in their very own homes,
Dispatch the danger that hurts them so.
All homes regulated, and judicially assessed.
Each child to have, a registered patron, the best.
To hold the child’s immature hand, until the age of twenty-five.
They could, by the young, already be known,
Or, from a charity be bestowed,
Thus, diminishing, the number of children’s lives being blighted;
And our complicit, dereliction of duty, will be somewhat, salvaged.

Elizabeth Haslam. Founder of the Michael Sieff Foundation