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Camden New Journal - LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Published:16 August 2007

The blame game will not bring Salma back

• I THINK that the overall issue in the Salma ElSharkawy case was a lack of her voice being listened to with any credible rights or power at all I read with complete despair the article on Salma’s death.
Such a cheeky, pretty and probably feisty little girl, you almost felt like you knew her.
I was not surprised at all with what I read but glad, unfortunately, that this would open another can of worms constantly kept under wraps until one of ours is dead.
When I say ours I mean people like Salma in the care system.
I know of so many dead ones.
Don’t you even dare get me wrong. I am not in the game of sensationalising the truth. It’s happened to people I knew. All system failures. The system.Yes the system. It breaks my heart. I feel for the parents. I’m not so sure that banging on doors of MPs is going to do them any good.
The blame game isn’t going to bring Salma back, its not clever enough and they will cover the tracks and use media propaganda in the end. The parents need urgent grief counselling.
The friends and public want to deal with their anger and they just don’t know how. The CNJ want some answers, too.
This case this girl has touched us all of us and most people don’t know quite what to do.
I don’t know if any one of you recall a documentary on the family who had their children taken away and then were proved innocent. Well I was appalled when the family were told that it was now in the best interests of the child to stay with their adoptive family. But I was much much more appalled about how the parents were brain-washed and forced to swallow it, like they’d be seen as bad if they didn’t.
This kind of liberal thinking is not in the interests of the child... ask any kid who has been taken away from their family even at a very young age.
Give counselling to the adoptive family and give the innocent parents back their children. This is a miscarriage of justice.
Back to Salma. So I take the article in my bag and bring it to my office and have it in front of me as an inspiration and, like, come on – we’ve got to stop all this. We have to. I was in care myself you see and it bothered me so much about the way the system was run then and we know it’s just the bloody same.
You see Salma is showing us everything we already know, but the public doesn’t know.
Bless her – “NW5 runaway”, in our Camden.
The answer is a youth parliament. If the NAYPIC (National Association of Young People in Care) Youth Parliament was up and running then I would have met that girl, I know I would have. She would have had representation legally, help from someone who had been in care too and she would be at home.
We as a society must listen and learn and change.
JO GAVIN
Cromer Street, WC1
Email: NAYPIC@ hotmail.com www.youthparliament.co.uk

Send your letters to: The Letters Editor, Camden New Journal, 40 Camden Road, London, NW1 9DR or email to letters@camdennewjournal.co.uk. The deadline for letters is midday Tuesday. The editor regrets that anonymous letters cannot be published, although names and addresses can be withheld. Please include a full name, postal address and telephone number. Letters may be edited for reasons of space.

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