Social services face hard questions over missed red flags in boy’s starvation death

Lawmaker Grace Chan says death of boy, 5, spotlights possible failure of assessment tools designed for evaluating high-risk cases The fate of a five-year-old boy starved to death by his mother, who had a history of drug abuse, could have been different had social workers noticed he was “just skin and bones”, a Hong Kong judge lamented in her ruling. Just three months before the boy died in September 2022, a worker from the Social Welfare Department handling the case visited the 37-year-old mother at home and reported observing “no visible injuries” on the boy’s face or any irregularities. After the department concluded that “the child abuse element had subsided”, the family was transferred to another social welfare organisation for follow-up. The new social worker soon discovered the boy had been absent from nursery for more than two-thirds of the school days across two academic years. Just as she began investigating – after failing to reach the mother – she learned of the boy’s death from the news on September 3.

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