JULIE BINDEL: Sara Sharif was failed by police and social services

Even as I write this, I expect that many of those who so systematically and catastrophically failed Sara Sharif will be preparing their defence.

It will almost certainly be the same rhetoric that gets wheeled out every time a horrified nation confronts yet another devastating case of child abuse that has ended in the terrible loss of a young life.

It is a variation of these four words: ‘Lessons will be learned.’

We heard these sentiments only last year following the trial for the murder of Star Hobson, who died at just 16 months old in September 2020 after enduring months of unspeakable cruelty at the hands of her mother, Frankie Smith, and Smith’s partner, Savannah Brockhill.

On five occasions, family members had referred the couple to police and social services. Nothing was done.

And we have heard them countless times before, too – each time, in fact, that another name is added to the tragic roll call of children whose lives unfold amid a maelstrom of neglect and abuse and are then brutally cut short.

They always ring hollow, and never more so than today, at the end of the trial into the murder of ten-year-old Sara Sharif, another child who died in the most unspeakable way amid what prosecuting barrister Bill Emlyn Jones KC described as a ‘culture of violence’ which was ‘normalised’ in the family household.

The court had previously heard that Sara’s body was found with dozens of injuries, among them bite marks and burns, and that she had been hooded, burned and beaten during more than two years of abuse.

It is very difficult to imagine the reality behind those words – the cloud of terror under which Sara must have continually lived, and the pain stored in the countless bruises and marks on her young body. It was nothing short of a daily living hell which is almost impossible for most of us to envisage.

I am sure that having to confront this reality in agonising detail via hours of distressing testimony will have had a life-changing effect on the jury.

But I congratulate them on finding Sara’s sadistic monster of a father Urfan Sharif – who remained unrepentant throughout his trial, and tried to pass the blame for his daughter’s death on to stepmother Beinash Batool – guilty, as well as Beinash.

My sorrow at what Sara went through is matched by a visceral anger at the extent to which those who should have protected her let her down.

Make no mistake, Sara was failed across the board – and to a degree that is almost staggering. She was failed by social services and police, who apparently chose to give free rein to a sadistic tyrant who was operating in plain sight.

She was failed by school teachers who referred her case to the local council after spotting her multiple bruises – which the desperate schoolgirl took to trying to cover with a hijab, and for which she continually gave different explanations – but then took no further action even when this clearly vulnerable young girl was withdrawn from school four weeks later.

And she was even failed by neighbours who heard the distressed screams of a child in severe pain and chose to do nothing.

Each one of these is horrible enough on its own. But put into the context of a world in which authorities are meant to liaise closely with each other to ensure that dots are joined, it is even more unforgivable. I was one of those who helped to pioneer what is known as this ‘multi-agency approach’ back in the 1990s, and I am proud to have done so. Employed effectively, it works. Here, it appears that multiple agencies seemed to collude in not doing their job.

How else to view it, when you learn of the extraordinary litany of allegations made against Sharif which were a matter of public record? He had been accused of abuse and violence by three previous partners, who had described in detail his sadistic and manipulative ways.

He threatened to kill them if they spoke to other men, would hold knives to their throats and remind them they were ‘his’, and was violent towards them throughout their pregnancies – before demanding paternity tests whenever a child of his was born.

When Sara was born in 2013 to Sharif’s then wife Olga – a troubled and vulnerable young woman he had met online – it was into a relationship already characterised by acrimony and abuse. This meant Sara was instantly made the subject of a child protection plan, something that is drawn up only against a backdrop of the most severe concerns for a child’s welfare.

Nonetheless, despite this ‘protection plan’ and the series of allegations against Sharif, it was to this coercive controller and domestic abuser that the family court saw fit to give full custody of Sara in 2019 when she was just six years old.

If it all wasn’t so devastating, it would be almost laughable to learn that before this happened, Sharif had been on a six-month ‘domestic violence education course’ in the wake of allegations made by Olga.

While such courses have their place for men who have shown indications of perpetrating low-level abuse and a willingness to change, they are pointless for men like Sharif who have systematically demonstrated that, for them, violence and control of women is a fact of life.

Moreover, as domestic violence campaigners have been trying to tell social services for decades, violence against women – for it is nearly always women – is one of the key indicators that someone might commit child abuse.

The reality is that abuse of the horrendous kind that Sara endured rarely happens in a vacuum: while a child could be tortured and murdered by a family member without any external clues, the chances of it happening are vanishingly small.

Instead, almost always when these tragedies unfold, we learn that concerns were raised, calls were made, social services were involved and there were police visits – yet nothing conclusive was done.

It is utterly shameful. For the brutal reality is that while we cannot do anything about the fact that monsters such as Sharif exist, we can do a great deal to limit the harm they cause. The fact that, after years of bleating that ‘lessons have been learned’, another beautiful young girl had her life cut short in such desperate circumstances is nothing short of a stain on our society.