“You cannot stop people who are determined to kill children”

Those are the words of Haringey’s director of children’s services, Sharon Shoesmith; one of many alarming sound bites to come from the department in the last week.

After an icy acknowledgement that the death of Baby P was tragic and horrific she then concluded: “We can’t get it right all the time.”

Still struggling to grasp the point, Ms Shoesmith is oblivious to the public’s revulsion that not only did Haringey not get it right, they got it so horribly wrong.

And yes, Ms Shoesmith says no body will resign, especially not her. Well, would you leave a £100,000 salary?

The government is (only) now sending a team of inspectors to audit the department, when they were warned six months before Baby P’s death that bad practice was jeopardising the safety of vulnerable children.

The warning came from Nevres Kemal, a social worker from Haringey children’s services. She sent a letter to Patricia Hewitt MP in 2007, calling for an urgent investigation into why children were being left in the care of known abusers.

She was suspended from her job and gagged with an injunction.

I dealt with social services when I worked as a school secretary. I had to arrange and attend multi agency meetings for pupils and refer any suspicious absences or behaviour.

It was part of the child protection policy- all members of staff in the school were trained to spot the signs of abuse, neglect and substance misuse. Each time a concern was raised there was strict procedure to follow both in referring and recording what happened.

Well that was the procedure; social services’ failure to arrange or attend important meetings, cut short any chance of progress with a large percentage of the pupils.

Their indifference when staff referred concerns and a generally uncooperative attitude didn’t just make my job more difficult, but had a direct impact on the lives of children.

Even though it was another authority over two hundred miles away, I still came up against the same brick walls which ultimately prevented children receiving the care they needed. The same failing infrastructure so many people report from children’s services all over the country.

Considering the wealth of evidence emerging, it’s becoming clear “at risk” is social services’ euphemism for putting something in your in tray but not marking it as really urgent, just kind of urgent, and not really taking much notice when a load of other stuff gets dumped on top.

I wonder if the same chaos is repeated when they’re arranging the Christmas party.

The multi agency approach which was supposed to protect Baby P was designed to be immune to failings of this scale. Yet in this authority alone it has failed at least two children in ten years.

It seems the multi agency approach to child protection exists for no other reason than to diminish responsibility so that when cases like this do happen, heads don’t roll.

Sharon Shoesmith; case in point.

The really infuriating thing is that, far from the whole service being a redundant pit of bureaucracy and people wearing name badges on chains, there are people who work hard. People passionate about their job, who see mistakes waiting to happen and aren’t just ignored at the highest level, but actively prevented from speaking out.

But enough of the negativity. Let’s look at what children’s services did do to help Baby P…

• When his mother was bailed for assaulting him over Christmas 2006 they returned him to her care.

• When he was taken to his GP with suspicious bruising and a head injury (allegedly caused by falling from the settee and being scratched by the dog) they sent a stair gate, a fire guard and, shortly before his death, offered his mother a seaside holiday.

• Oh and they also fought for her right to keep the child she gave birth to whilst in custody awaiting trial for Baby P’s death, because according to them “it was her human right to keep her child.”

Speaking of human rights and custody, in 2006 the BBC screened a documentary “When Satan Came To Town” telling the story of five families in Rochdale who were ripped apart by the eager and ill informed meddling of social services, when they wrongly accused ten parents of abusing their children in satanic rituals.

It all started in 1990 when a seven year old boy told his teacher he had been dreaming of ghosts. Inspired by then-recent events in America, British social services were adamant satanic rituals involving children were being conducted in the UK.

They began removing children from families in a witch hunt on alleged cult members (who coincidentally didn’t have the education or money to support a legal fight against them.) One of the motives the programme explores is a department obsessed with results and targets and out of touch with reality.

It took full blown a government enquiry to convince them satanic abuse was not rife in the British country side!

Like the NHS, social services is a results driven, box ticking reminder that despite staff training, there is no replacement for common sense.

With fresh claims that 80% of seriously harmed children are “missed” by child protection services, it seems likely to take many more government enquiries to solve the fundamental issues at the heart of a failing department which remains crucial to so many lives.

And the public agrees. The Manchester Evening News recently carried a poll on their website in which 87% have said the authorities are failing “at risk” children.

In a BBC video, Liz Santry admitted Haringey children’s services had failed to protect Baby P, concluding: “We want to do everything we possibly can to make our child protection procedures as strong as possible.”

We should hope so.

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