A sunset to stun and silence in awe this week. Photos here are unedited other than cropping. Taken from our bedroom window. The bedroom LB and Tom once shared. A room once filled with happiness, lego creations and die cast models.

It’s been a stunning and silencing week in other, less good ways. On Tuesday, File on Four first aired Lucy Adam’s investigation of Transforming Care and the experiences of young people incarcerated in Assessment and Treatment Units. A truly chilling listen [available here] for so many reasons. Not least hearing 17 year old Bethany sing a Bob Marley song to her dad on the phone from seclusion. Bethany has been in seclusion [locked in a room and fed through a hatch] for months now under the ‘care’ of St Andrews (non) Care. At the time of recording, she had the inside of a Bic biro embedded in her arm for three months. Yep. My brain kind of juddered and shuddered on hearing this detail, unconsciously parking it in a whole new ‘must have misheard’ folder for minutes before other listeners raised it on twitter.

St Andrews were the subject of a Channel 4 Dispatches film Under Lock and Key a year ago now and continue to bludgeon the word ‘care’ with remarkable indifference and extraordinary reward. Supported by commissioners shelling out £13k a week (yep, £13k a week) for casual violence and brutality on young people.

Chris Hatton, who worked with Lucy on the background to the programme published an analysis of restraints, assaults and self-harm in in-patient units. Not an easy read.

[As an aside, we walked passed the Birmingham outpost of St Andrews last Sunday during a #CaminoLB walk… the place was a like an apocalyptic film setting with no sign of life.]

Bethany’s dad joined twitter after the programme was aired and has been filling in details about the experiences she (and her family) have been forced to endure. Walsall local authority are Bethany’s ‘corporate parents’ and by late week they stepped up to engage with unfolding events. Not with the Bic pen or Bethany’s incarceration/hatch feeding but her dad’s new social media activity. They took out injunction against him because he included a photo of her on his profile page.

Instead of working with Bethany, her dad and others who know her, in order to provide effective and supportive ‘support’ to enable her to live an independent and meaningful life, St Andrews are choosing to trouser around £600k a year to generate and sustain a battle which Bethany is guaranteed to lose and continue to lose.

[I can’t even begin to imagine what this experience must be like. Experiencing sustained state sanctioned power and brutality, with no recourse to comfort, loving or any sniff of rescue… Aged 17.

Sticking a Bic pen in your arm makes a kind of sense that sickens me to the core.]

Staying with local authority monstrousness albeit at a lesser level, an academic colleague tweeted earlier today asking if it was common practice for local authorities to ask to run research findings relating to the social care they provide through their comms department. Wow. Really? A public sector body thinking they somehow have the right to ‘check’ independent research findings funded by another public sector body. This was around the same time as Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the US Supreme Court. Grimmer than grim.

Finally, the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust failings, documented by the brilliant and committed journalistic work of another BBC social affairs correspondent, Michael Buchanan, continue to grow as families come forward. Buchanan, who has been following this story for 18 months yesterday tweeted:

Once again, a government body grimly and blatantly ignoring human pain, prioritising reputation over failings and any whiff of improvement or change.

What a week.

[Postscript: I’ve somehow missed approving a wedge of comments on this blog over the last few weeks. Sorry and thank you, as always, for contributing sense and thoughtfulness to these pages.]