Morning:
8°c
Baby P's mother and his killer stand named and shamed.
How much do they care? Not a lot to judge by the carefully scripted note Tracey Connelly wrote to the judge in an appeal for clemency and her hopes to resume a life of “one long party” when she is freed in around five years.
Bizarrely, Haringey council whose judgment has been faulty throughout this terrible saga, opposed the naming of the couple. How can justice be seen to be done in that case? Connelly, her killer boyfriend Steven Barker and his equally terrifying brother Jason Owen are not beyond responsibility.
They are damaged and dangerous people who should never have been left near a child but somehow ended up at liberty to mistreat and sexually abuse eight children at their home. They are fully able to answer for what has happened. If it means that the rest of their lives is less agreeable or difficult on release from prison then so be it. Other children involved can be protected, or renamed.
The sole clear reason for delaying naming those responsible for the suffering and death is Barker's involvement in a child rape trial. Once that conviction was secured, the first responsibility of the law is to be public and accountable.
Daylight cannot bring back a murdered child but it prevents at least the striking details from being obscured.
As I read through the litany of Baby P's abuse, an account that most of us can only bear to take in by blocking out the mental images of infant pain and distress it conjures up, a friend noted that it was “just low-life”. And so it is: but it is low-life that is part of our shared lives, however little we like it. The councils we vote for run the social services. Our taxes fund them.
Lack of curiosity, not too much of it, was the central problem here. I do not claim to know exactly how to apportion blame in this case but there is more than enough to go round. Surely those who defended Haringey's social services boss Sharon Shoesmith and her key staff on the grounds that a heavy workload in a deprived part of London left them unable to see through the wicked deception of her sadistic boyfriend and his violent, crack cocaine-addled brother must now reconsider?
There was no shortage of visits to the child's home. What was lacking, tragically as it turned out, was any initiative or a desire to find out more than was apparent about the circumstances —despite a back-catalogue of warning signs.
Although social workers should earn our admiration for confronting domestic circumstances most of us would shrink from, their job is or should be the safety of the child, first and foremost.
Lashing out at Connelly is pointless. So is caricaturing her as a “sex-obsessed woman”. We are dealing with a woman fathered by a paedophile and neglected by her own drug-addled mother before being shunted off to a correctional school where she used sex to draw attention to herself. A close relative was in care in Islington care homes when they became recruiting grounds for paedophilia.
Man hands on misery to man — and woman, too. Her life was already scarred, probably beyond redemption. What is unforgivable in an advanced society is that a handful of devious people could outwit the full sophistication of modern social services.
If the website campaigns targeting her are unpleasant in their lynch-mob mentality, they are also a sign, among the vitriol, of something many more people share: a feeling that the Baby P death, while it will not be the last case of an abused child, must not be just another statistic on the saddest of lists.
There are things to be done if we have the will to do them. It must surely be clear to even the most fair-minded observer that a system that allowed professionals to come and go so regularly into a problem home without seeing that the situation was dangerous is flawed.
As one senior social services figure from another London borough told me, the sheer multiplicity of agencies has become a bar to their effectiveness: to the extent that she has to counsel her problem families on how to keep up with their diary dates of well-intentioned outsiders. “We had a spreadsheet for one family,” she recalls. “Then someone to teach them how to read the spreadsheet.”
Reports can make recommendations, communication can be improved but there is a limit to what incremental changes can do. We need to rethink an approach to keeping families together, which too often turns out to mean that dysfunctional households are allowed to keep children, with the only safety net being the sporadic presence of outside carers.
Surely, the balance is wrong here. I have real sympathy for the dreadful circumstances in which Connelly was brought up, if not for her glib self-pity. None at all though, for a system that fails to break the cycle of cruelty and neglect when the facts were there to be deciphered. So many people had doubts and worries. So little happened.
It is hard to make the call to remove children from suspect homes. But the evidence is that early intervention counts and that this must be the rule not the exception. The threshold at which children are removed from risky circumstances and adoptive parents are sought must be much lower than it presently is.
If that happens sooner rather than later, the chance of giving a child a worthwhile life is much greater. Baby P, the bright-eyed little boy in the pictures, would have been most unlikely to escape from the circumstances of his upbringing as anything other than seriously affected. In that case, why leave him there?
We can guess the heartbreaking stories we are likely to read on the other side of the balance sheet if “nosey” social workers are given stronger entitlements to recommend that small children be removed from their birth-homes.
It's a dilemma we would all rather not face. But while we are focused, however reluctantly, on the netherworld in which Baby P lived and died, let's start making the choices that might save others from the same fate. I know which side of the argument I would rather err on.
