A Guide to Child Protection
Introduction
There are 39,000 children on the child protection register across the country. Putting someone's name on a register doesn't add up to safeguarding children. The register is part of a complicated process of safeguarding; the process doesn't work.
Agencies like the NSPCC, CEOP, Childline and many others have a mission to protect children, none are very good at this, mainly they excel at spreading fear of adult among children, and crucially they spread suspicion among adults of each other.
Understanding Safeguarding Failure
Children are killed every day at the hands of their carers. Sometimes the systemic failure of the agencies of caring make the headlines and then politicians leap into action.
Victoria Climbie died Feb 2000, she was starved to death after prolonged abuse at the hands of her guardians. Social workers, police and NHS had failed to raise the alarm. Lord Laming was set to work: he advised a complete overhaul of child protection policies. Most of his 108 recommendations become law in 2004 Children Act.
Three years later Laming, having been called on again, noted that many of his recommendations had not been taken up by local councils. Laming's observation is crucial to grasping the failure of child protection in Britain. Something mysterious is happening between the passing of laws and their enforcement. Clearly, the agents of safeguarding tasked with following a new set of guidelines and practices, quite simply, didn't. And another child died needlessly.
When Peter Connelly died in 2007 the gaze of the whole nation fell upon the borough of Haringey. The main focus was on Haringey and child services director, Sharon Shoesmith, but once the Sun had finished its vitriolic attack on social workers, the focus was then on the failure of child protection in general.
Could it be that Laming's recommendations were unworkable or simply didn't work, that is, they didn't fit with the actual work that safeguarders were doing. The politicians sent for someone else - Professor Munro.
Professor Munro's report stressed that early help is vital to keeping children safe, and proposed that local authorities should be given a duty to provide early help. Munro made a number of new recommendations but most are contradicted by the ConDem Government's cuts agenda.
For instance, services that 'intervene' early to prevent children ending up on the child protection register have been cut by an average of 20% across the country.
However, Munro did recommend that Ofsted be taken out of the picture, which can only improve everyone's moral. That organisation is totally discredited after re-drafting its report, for Ed Balls into Haringey's performance in the Baby Peter case, 17 times.
Ofsted's role is to gauge whether organisations are meeting given standards of performance. One minute they gave Haringey a glowing report, the next, they found the council wanting. Ofsted's somersault was miraculous, for an organisation that is only lackluster at best.
Beyond Good Intentions
Beyond initiating enquiries and writing reports the ConDem Government demanded full discloser of child abuse cases. Possibly a sop to the Sun. Previously, information was only provided in summary form. What followed was interesting.
Before a child is removed from its guardian a serious case review must be undertaken. In the parlance these are called SCRs. They are costly, a simple case may cost £40,000 and something more complex, upwards of £100,000.
Over the past year from June 2010, the number of SCRs has fallen by a half. Should we conclude that the number cases of children at serious risk has fallen to a half the level of the previous year.
Again, another mystery, could it have something to do with the fact that councils can't afford the cost associated with SCRs? Could it be that the innocents involved in these cases don't want every detail to their lives revealed in public? Also, staff involved at the time are not being asked to participate fully in an inquiry, they are marginalised. So those that know most contribute little to the process.
What we do know is that the authors of these reviews are struggling to write them in such a way as to protect identities and thereby, for the best of intentions, are not the telling the full story.
In Sum
A child dies, politicians react, academics research, recommendations are made, new laws are passed, practitioners absorb their new responsibilities and clueless inspectors inspect.. What should happen, doesn't - another mystery.
Agencies of Suspicion and Fear
In 1987, 121 children were taken from their parents in Cleveland, based on the views of two paediatricians. Social services were convinced that they had uncovered a satanic covern at work. There is some suggestion that the clinicians were influenced by articles they had read in US journals on child abuse. A Government report in 1994 confirmed there never was any evidence of ritual satanic abuse in Cleveland.
In 1990, the NSPCC decided to issue a ‘Satanic Indicators’ pamphlet to various social service departments. Unsurprisingly, armed with the guide supplied by the NSPCC, social workers started to discover hives of satanic worshipers abusing children. In Orkney, 1991, parents had their children stolen by social services amid suspected ritual child abuse - based on the evidence of three other children.
An inquiry report in October 1992 criticised Orkney Social Services and produced 194 recommendations for changes in child care practices. No one noticed that the whole premise of a child protection service needing 194 changes was fundamentally flawed?
Undetered the NSPCC continued to manufacture the child abuse panic, hiring Saatchi-and-Saatchi to promote its messages that all adults are potential abuses and needed to be watched.
Promoting the panic.....Notes from here down......
. The Ministry of Justice response revealed that where in 2005, 1,363 people were sent down for sexual offences against children, in 2010 judges sentenced a record 2,135 people for sexual offences against children, 60% increase. (BBC story, 2/9/11)
So Donald Findlater of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation was happy that more adults were being convicted. But he was unhappy that the number was not higher still. And why? Because ‘it’s still the case that most children who are sexually abused do not report it’.
Claire Lilley from the NSPCC told the BBC, ‘is that these people who have been convicted for these child-abuse crimes – it is only the tip of the iceberg’.
Its invisibility – the ‘secret crime’, as ChildLine founder Esther Rantzen called it – is proof of its existence. ‘stranger danger’
Childline was set up in 1986.
establishment in 2006 of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection unit (CEOP), quango, behind the Lee and Kim cartoons, SID the superhero in these cartoons is real-life incarnations at CEOP . UK Council for Child Internet Safety – a coalition of industry, charity and government groups,
plans to collapse CEOP into the National Crime Agency
The point: CEOP has an added incentive to try to make the most of Friday’s news about conviction rates: it could be the last chance to convince the government of CEOP’s vital importance. There is nothing conspiratorial about the activities of the NSPCC or CEOP; rather, they are institutionalised expressions of the corrosive suspicion of other adults.