On 17th December 2024, two killers, Urfan Sharif and Beinash Batool, were given long life sentences: 40 and 30 years respectively. They will surely go down in history as two of the most heinous child abusers in British history. They subjected Sara to unimaginable cruelty, while the officials with the means and powers to protect her, did nothing. Quite rightly, details about her life and death, which I won’t repeat here, evoke a visceral reaction in any normal person. The deliberate torture of a child defies what it means to be human.
Her case represents an abject failure of British society. Her father and stepmother failed in their primary duty to love and protect their child. The family court failed when it placed Sara into the hands of her father who was known to be violent. Surrey social services failed when it neglected to observe signs of serious abuse in the months before her death.
Little innocent Sara Sharif was known to the social services before she was born. Between 2010 and 2014, the police visited the family several times; the other children complained of injuries, and Sara was eventually taken into care in 2014 and then again in 2015. She lived with her mother until 2019 when Sara reported that she had been violent towards her. In 2019, the same judge who had overseen the previous care proceedings, recommended that Sara Sharif be returned to her father, Urfan Sharif — the man who eventually beat her to death. In 2022, Sara’s school noticed bruising and reported it to the authorities. In March 2023 they noticed bruising again and this prompted a social services investigation. The case was closed after 6 days and Sara never returned to school.
She was found dead on 10th August 2023, a couple of weeks into the summer holidays.
The judge who sentenced Sara’s murderers noted that ‘this case brings into sharp relief the risks of unsupervised home-schooling of vulnerable children,’, laying the blame for her death squarely on the right of parents to remove their children from school to home educate them. In her statement about the case, the Children’s Commissioner for England and Wales said, ‘We need proper oversight of children being educated at home, through the long-promised register of children not in school and by requiring councils to sign off on home educating requests for some of the most vulnerable children.’
Narrative framing home education as responsible for such evil makes fools of us all
The trouble is, these statements defy any straightforward analysis of the facts. Sara Sharif was well known to social services already. She died during the summer holidays when no school staff would have been able to monitor her. At the time of her death, she was not assigned a social worker, meaning her parents would not have needed permission to withdraw her from school, even under the proposed new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Given these facts, it is disingenuous in the extreme to blame Sara’s tragic murder on home education. It is a deliberately manipulative tactic which subverts the real issue; that she was failed by the people who should have saved her. Perhaps one can make an argument for more oversight of elective home education, but to link the extremist forms of child abuse with home education is both illogical and unjust. It was no surprise then that the First Reading of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill in Parliament coincided with the sentencing of Sara’s killers. However, the narrative framing home education as responsible for such evil makes fools of us all. Sara’s life could have been saved by well-resourced and competent professionals — not by the introduction of a new database.
ParentPower Team
