“Fifteen. That is the number of times the authorities were informed that Sara Sharif was potentially in danger,” said The Times.
As well as these documented opportunities, there were no doubt many undocumented chances “to rescue this child from the fate that awaited her” at the hands of her father Urfan Sharif, 43, and her stepmother Beinash Batool, 30. Sara was found dead, aged ten, at her home in Woking, in August 2023.
Murder occured ‘under the gaze of the authorities’
A post-mortem found that she had at least 71 external injuries, including bruises, burns and human bite marks. She had 29 bone fractures, including one to her neck and 10 to her spine, from being beaten with a cricket bat and a metal pole. Plastic hoods, with holes for her mouth, had been placed over her head. Her battered body was so dirty when she died that her family jet-washed it before they left her and fled to Sharif’s native Pakistan. Sharif and Batool returned to face justice; they were both found guilty of murder last week, and jailed for life. But we’re left to wonder: “How could this happen?” And how could it happen, as so often before, “under the gaze of the authorities”?
From her birth in January 2013, Sara was judged to be at risk of significant harm, said Emine Sinmaz in The Guardian. Her father had been accused of abusing her Polish mother, Olga Domin, and his other children. Sara was later placed in foster care; the couple split and each accused the other of abuse. In October 2019, despite a series of reports about Sharif’s violence, a family court ruled that he should have custody of Sara. In 2022 and 2023, teachers noticed a series of bruises on her body, and contacted social services – who took no action. In April 2023, after more concerns were raised, Sharif told teachers Sara would be home-schooled. She was never seen outside her home again.
The abusive couple were cunning, said Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph. They had made Sara wear a hijab to hide bruises, and no doubt to make teachers “feel awkward” about inquiring too closely. Perhaps cultural sensitivity – fear of being seen as Islamophobic – “made the authorities nervous”.
‘Exhaustion in social services’
Rather than an excess of wokeness, “it is far more likely that the fault lay with exhaustion in social services”, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Time. “There is a 19% vacancy rate nationally in child and family social services.” The service that was meant to be looking after Sara, at Surrey County Council, had 30% of posts unfilled. Too many social workers have “neither the time nor the skills to look beyond the obvious”.
After each of these horrific cases – Victoria Climbié, Peter Connelly, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, Star Hobson – we hear that lessons will be learnt. But Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England, surely spoke for the nation when she said that more time-sapping reviews and inquiries would merely “delay the crucial task of making services better”. We must do it now. “Because the next Sara, and Arthur, and Star, is already being battered.”