The Guardian reports today on the horrific state of child protection. The evidence it has uncovered suggests that the failings that led to no one intervening to protect Baby P are hideously common.
“More than 80% of children who are killed or seriously injured as a result of abuse or neglect are missed by the national child protection register, the Guardian can reveal. … The figures, obtained from unpublished government-commissioned research, show a widespread pattern of missed opportunities where police, social workers and health professionals fail to communicate or act on evidence of potential abuse. Postmortem case reviews included in the research where children died in the care of their families reveal that midwives, hospital staff and social workers saw evidence of abuse while the children were still alive but councils did not place them on the child protection register.
Despite signs of the abuse being clear to authorities, infants who died from forced starvation, broken ribs and smashed skulls were all missed off the register, which lists 29,200 children “known to be suffering harm”. Just 33 of the 189 children whose death or serious injury prompted a local authority serious case review between 2005 and 2007 were on the register, according to the analysis of the most serious cases to be submitted to ministers next spring.”
There appears to be a variety of causes for this including a lack of coordination between the social services and other branches of government, incompetence and complacency. But there also seem to be some perverse incentives at work. As The Guardian notes:
There is clearly an urgent need for an urgent review and reform of these procedures. The current state of affairs is simply unacceptable. There also needs to be far greater accountability: Haringey’s attitude to the Baby P case seems to sum up what is wrong“Concern emerged this week that government policy has discouraged councils from decisive intervention in suspected cases of abuse and neglect. Ofsted, the government agency that rates local authority children and young people’s services departments, docks marks if children remain on the register for more than two years. Child protection lawyers also believe a steep rise in legal fees associated with taking children into care is putting children at risk. In May the court fee for a local authority to bring such a case to court rose from around £100 to £2,225.”
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