by Unity

Despite the snarky title, I don’t want to spend too much time raking over the obvious parallels between Cameron’s shameless attempt to gain political capital out of the ongoing trial of two young boys for what is, by any standards, a staggeringly brutal assault on two other children of the same age, and the actions of a certain former shadow Home Secretary who pulled much the same stunt 17 years ago.

The main lesson is all this, such as it is, is that politicians will happily say almost anything if they think there’s an extra vote or two in it.

That said, Cameron’s efforts to jump on this particular bandwagon do serve to reinforce the general impression that both he and his campaign team are desperately inattentive, woefully out of touch and only casually acquainted with real world.



What I do want to reflect on here is the fact that yet again we have a case that seems likely to spawn another significant inquiry into the apparent failings of the UK’s child protection system.

It’s a sobering thought but, between 1973 and 1999, there were more than seventy such inquiries undertaken in the UK.

Some attracted a higher profile than others. Many, had little or no impact on public policy and their recommendations were quietly binned when public interest died down.

In 1999, social policy researchers at John Moores University asked for copies of the findings of seventy public inquiries into cases of alleged child abuse, stretching back to the case of Maria Colwell. Nine of these inquiry reports, most of which dated to the 70s and 80s, were found to be missing and further eight reports, over and above the seventy requested by researchers, were later found to exist at the time the research was undertaken.

What the researcher’s found, in the reports they were able to analyse, will sound depressingly familiar – almost half recommended better training and supervision of care staff and better inter-agency co-operation.

It’s perfectly possible to map out almost the entire history of the major public policy and legislative developments in child protection for at least the last 37 years – if not all the way back to World War 2 and the murder of Dennis O’Neill by his faster father in 1945, which resulted in the 1948 Children Act and the creation of the first Children’s Boards – by setting out a chronological list of dead children and the judges and other public officials who investigated the circumstances leading to their untimely deaths.

In fact, that’s often what people are doing anyway, as its almost impossible to come across a feature article in the press about child protection issues that doesn’t list at least two or three past cases from a long list that includes Colwell and Climbie, of course, plus Peter ‘Baby P’ Connelly, Jasmine Beckford, Heida Koseda, Tyra Henry, Toni-Ann Byfield, Rikki Neave, Kira Ishaq and a depressingly long list of others.

There are some exceptions to this general rule, of course.

There was the Cleveland child abuse panic in which the name most associated with it was that of the Marietta Higgs, the doctor at the centre of the case. There were also the ‘satanic ritual abuse’ panics that are known to the public by the location in which they occurred (Rochdale, Orkney, Broxtowe and Lewis) and although the case of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson is universally known by reference to name of their victim, James Bulger, this is by no means always the case.

When two young boys, Martin Brown and Brian Hown, were killed by an eleven year-old girl in 1968, it was the name of the perpetrator, Mary Bell, that was attached to the case, not that of the victims, whose names have become little more than a footnote to the story so far as most of the public are concerned.

All this seems to be taken for granted.

Rarely, if ever, does anyone make the obvious connection and point out that these cases (and inquiries) seem to have been the primary driving force behind the development of child protection policy, and the systems and legislation that go with it, for the last half century.

We have a child protection system in this country that, on the face of it, has evolved by way of lurching from one fuck-up to the next, and then on to the next one after that, without anyone really taking to time to step back, look at the bigger picture, and wonder exactly what all this is actually for or whether there might be a better way of going about this than simply reacting to whatever the most recent screw-up. A system that’s been built on crisis management.

When you look at it that way – should we really be surprised that the current system is dysfunctional and that is sometimes gets things badly wrong?

If the health of the army and the care of the elderly have, at various times, been thought important enough to warrant taking a step back from party politics to look, dispassionately, at the evidence then why not also the protection of children?

Since World War 2, Royal Commissions have been convened to examine questions about civil liability and compensation for personal injury, the role and influence of the press, the structure of local government, the provision of legal services, environmental pollution and trade unions and employer’s associations.

Surely someone out there thinks that child protection is important enough to deserve the same consideration rather than treating it as just another cheap way of getting votes?