An horrific assault in which two children were almost killed by brothers aged 10 and 11 should have been prevented by the agencies that were supposed to be caring for the young attackers, a report has found.
Two boys aged 9 and 11 were left for dead in April last year after being lured to scrubland near a South Yorkshire mining village. There, their assailants launched a pre-planned attack in which the victims were tortured, sexually humiliated and subjected to sadistic violence.
A study into the attack at Edlington, near Doncaster, by the local safeguarding children board, is said to have identified multiple failings by numerous agencies involved with the brothers and their family in the years leading up to the incident, drawing parallels with the James Bulger murder.
On Friday, a shortened executive summary of the report is due to be published after the two boys, now aged 11 and 12, are sentenced at Sheffield Crown Court for causing grievous bodily harm with intent. They were charged with attempted murder but the Crown accepted guilty pleas to the lesser offence.
A leaked copy of the full report, which has been seen by the BBC Newsnight, programme, includes damning information that will be left out of the published summary, including the finding that nine agencies in Doncaster failed on 31 separate occasions to take measures that might have prevented the attack.
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The report is the latest in a series of inquiries into failings by Doncaster social services where, since 2004, seven children have died while they were on the at-risk register.
The brothers lived in the town until 25 days before they nearly killed the other children. Their parents — a violent father and a drug-addicted mother — had a tempestuous relationship that ended in December 2008.
Several of their seven sons and stepsons, aged from 8 to 19, were used to running wild on the streets of a housing estate whose residents made repeated vain pleas for assistance from police and social services. The Times revealed last year that the 11-year-old daughter of Iraqi Kurds who lived next door to the family kept a diary that recorded how they lived in daily fear of the boys. They were sworn at, racially abused and had stones thrown at them.
When the authorities finally stepped in and the two brothers were placed seven miles away in Edlington, in the care of foster parents in their sixties, their behaviour became steadily more violent.
According to the serious case review, the brothers’ family — which cannot be named for legal reasons — had been known to Doncaster Council’s children’s services department for 14 years. It says that care professionals focused on the mother and neglected the needs of her children. Though some social workers showed exceptional commitment, they were let down by a lack of leadership and inadequate multi-agency communication.
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In 2006, one of the boys was excluded from school after threatening staff with a baseball bat. Though a meeting was held to discuss the incident, no action was taken. Contrary to legal requirements, there were no follow-up measures a year later after complaints about one of the boys being responsible for an arson attack and killing ducks in a local park.
The highly critical report, chaired by Roger Thompson, says that despite a “pattern of violent behaviour against other children” the brothers were merely treated as naughty boys.
A further warning bell was sounded in Edlington, a week before the near-fatal assault, when an 11-year-old local choirboy was kicked and beaten. The brothers were due to be questioned about the incident on the day that they launched their near-fatal attack.
On that day, two best friends — who had planned to go fishing — were attacked with a sharpened stick, bricks, a noose and a lit cigarette. They were stamped on and made to perform sex acts on each other. One boy, after pleading to be left to die, had a sink dropped on his head.
Mr Thompson said that he was confident that “things are improving”. “It went very wrong here. The services were not properly provided, there was poor leadership. Multiagency working was not as effective as it should be. It was really a dysfunctional service in Doncaster,” he said.