From Jasmine Beckford to Daniel Pelka: a history of chaos and calumny

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/17/jasmine-beckford-daniel-pelka-history-chaos

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Almost three decades lie between the deaths of four-year-old Daniel Pelka and four-year-old Jasmine Beckford. Both suffered cruelty, beatings, and starvation. Both were, in effect, tortured to death. In those three decades there has been a revolution in our awareness of what adults can do to children. And a counter-revolution. In all the blaming and bleating that has accompanied the publication this week of Coventry's serious case review into Daniel Pelka's life and death misses this vital context. The similarities in the suffering of these two children should remind us of the calumny and chaos that has defined the history of childhood adversity in Britain.

The 1985 inquiry by Louis Blom-Cooper into the death of Jasmine Beckford triggered the transformation of child protection services. He delivered an ultimatum: thou shalt not <em>not</em> intervene. Proactive protective services were to be wrapped around children, and child welfare professionals were to be clear: the children – not adults – were their clients; they had to seek out endangered children and discover what they might have to say about their lives.

The mid-80s became the moment, therefore, when the state took the side of children. The professions were empowered to use their judgment to intervene on their behalf. In that context, sexual abuse was added to the category of concerns.

Almost instantly there was a mutiny by adults who felt accused, and by reluctant professionals. By 1988 another inquiry, by Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, into contested allegations of child abuse in Cleveland concluded that there was "no reason to doubt" the medical evidence that had precipitated the controversy, but reserved its ire for the services that had intervened.

This set the template for practice thereafter. As the Conservative health minister Tony Newton told the House of Commons in July 1988, "proper action to protect children'"would not be allowed to "trample on the rights of parents". Professional protocols were rendered useless by these irreconcilable imperatives: the Children Act placed the "paramountcy" of children's best interests against parental rights. Practitioners felt patrolled to ensure that they did not transgress parent power; the Children Act 1989 and the Memorandum of Good Practice, published in 1992, proclaimed the emancipation of children's testimony. In fact children's testimony was not freed up, but was controlled within increasingly forensic priorities. By the mid-1990s, following ferocious campaigns against child welfare professionals, policy drifted away from child abuse and protection, towards family protection. Social workers were discredited and disempowered. This defeat of the central profession concerned with child welfare inevitably discouraged teachers, police and paediatricians from a more interventionist stance.

Subsequent inquiries merely cemented what has come to be known as a compliance culture: checklists and targets are perceived not as protecting children but providing cover for wary professionals. Although they were commanded to work together, the purpose of co-operation was less obvious, and less likely to happen. Children might be assessed, but that didn't mean they would be protected.

Despite this cold climate, feminist campaigners persuaded politicians that domestic violence against women carried serious implications for children. Policymakers began to understand this, and gender was knitted into their understanding of generational abuse.

New Labour showed little sympathy with the child welfare professions. Tony Blair's approach to children, notoriously, was animated less by protection than policing: managing "problem families", antisocial behaviour and crime.

But yet another death provoked a sea change: after Victoria Climbié was killed by her carers, the government in 2003 introduced Every Child Matters. It was another attempt at holistic childcare, albeit too late to repair the damage already done to the professions and, in any case, cauterised by managerialist lore and language.

And so we come back to another dead child. No doubt the education secretary, Michael Gove, will be outraged. Following the death of Baby P, he commissioned Professor Eileen Munro to review services in 2011. Her report warned that the system's ability to be child-centred had been compromised: bureaucracy and compliance culture had "obscured" the centrality of relating to the vulnerable child.

Gove followed up in November 2012 with sound and fury – against trade unions for being outdated, academics for being ideological, and politicians for preserving their own networks against child-centred education. The state was failing children he said, putting 'the rights of biological parents ahead of vulnerable children.'

But Gove was not about to invent a new alliance between the state and children. He accused social workers of being "de-sensitised to squalor" and to parents who left their children in "soiled nappies and scummy baths". Sinister echoes of discredited notions of an underclass, of "cycles of deprivation" loitered in his enthusiastic assault on social services. He dumped Every Child Matters: it was, he noted in February 2012, "meddlesome". No one could be accused of "meddlesome" intervention in the life of Daniel Pelka.

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