Daily Telegraph  15 June 2007 [Colin Waine]
also see The  Scotsman coverage  09 June 2007

Obese children under the age of 12 should be placed on the child protection register if social services believe their health is at risk, doctors said yesterday.  In the most extreme cases, medics believe they should also be taken away from their parents and put into care.

 

Their comments followed a BBC investigation which questioned 50 consultant paediatricians and found that obesity was a factor in at least 20 child protection cases in the last year.  A motion to be debated at the British Medical Association’s annual conference this month will call for overfeeding to be considered a form of parental neglect or abuse.

 

Dr Matthew Capehorn, a GP from Rotherham who will propose the motion, said that doctors should take the same measures when faced with an obese child as they would when confronted with a child who is seriously malnourished.  “If a child who is stick and bones turns up at a GP’s surgery or a at a hospital, there is immediate outrage. Health visitors and social services are called in and a court will decide if that child should be taken into care,” he said.  “ But the same alarm bells don’t ring with an obese child even though in the long-term they are as much at risk of serious health problems as a child who is seriously under-nourished.”

 

Colin Waine said it was vital that parents woke up to the dangers of obesity. “ If parents are given appropriate advice and choose to ignore it, this does have very serious consequences for that child.  The prevalence of type 2 diabetes is rising in children and this will have disastrous consequences on the quality of their lives.”

 

Dr Tabitha Randell, a consultant paediatrician from Nottingham, said she believed that some parents were unaware of the harm they were causing.  She said that she regularly saw children entering puberty before the age of 10 because they were so overweight.  Researchers have speculated that hormones released from the added fat cells could be responsible.  In one extreme case, Dr Randell saw a child of two who weighed more than four stone (25.4kg).  “ They said she was big-boned,” she said. “I think the perception of parents is a very real problem.  If you see every other child in the playground with their belly hanging over their trousers you think that’s normal.”

 

But the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health said that obesity was “a public health problem, not a child protection issue”.  A spokesman said: “There may be a few families that give cause for concern where there are other matters of neglect or emotional harm and this is where a paediatrician might have discussions with social services.  A spokesman for the Association of Directors of Children’s Services said: “We are not aware of a single child protection where obesity has been the sole trigger.”