Politics

Why Baby P died

November 17, 2008
A furore that's still intensifying
A furore that's still intensifying

Judging by today's papers, there's little chance that the furore about the death of Baby P is going to go away any time soon—it's already expanding well beyond the facts of the case into a full-blown controversy on the state of society, the media and politics.

Before we all add our voices to the growing political row, however, we should remember one single fact. A vulnerable child, just 17 months old, died. Instead of being lavished with love and taken on all those outings that trigger healthy child development, Baby P had his ribs broken and his back broken. He was bruised, battered and lacerated, possibly by a dog. Some of his nails were missing and one of his front teeth had been knocked out. The child’s mother and two men have been found guilty of allowing or causing his death on 3rd August last year. They await sentencing and the government has set up an inquiry, led by Lord Laming, into his death.

Baby P had been the subject of a police investigation into child abuse, which was dropped the day before he was found dead. This had been triggered by visits to his doctor, in autumn 2006, when his bruises could not be explained. He was referred to paediatricians at the Whittington, who said that the marks suggested non-accidental injury. He was put on the child protection register in Haringey and was released into the care of a friend of his mother. At the end of January 2007, before the police investigation had concluded, he was returned home.



Since the conclusion of the trial, the head of children’s services in Haringey, Sharon Shoesmith, has refused to resign; the Prime Minister and David Cameron have clashed in the Commons about the case and various agencies and government departments have been engaged in a macabre game of buck-passing. And the media has done its level best to decide who or what best to blame.

But the point about the case is, in fact, simple. Whatever Lord Laming’s inquiry concludes, wherever the moving finger finally rests, the system failed baby P, as did Haringey, as did all those individual workers engaged in what we call “multi-agency working”—who rang on Baby P’s mother’s doorbell, or met the family elsewhere, and failed to protect him from torture and death. It hardly matters who is most responsible. All of those in that system are responsible, to some extent because the system and those in it have a collective duty to safeguard children, and a child died in breach of that duty of care.

As to who should resign: of course Sharon Shoesmith must go—she is responsible for safeguarding the children of the borough of Haringey—and, sooner or later, she will. But all of those involved should consider their consciences—for we will probably never know what they suspected and failed to do. Shoesmith is, almost certainly, not the only one who should apologise and go.

My experience of many social workers is that they are overworked, highly stressed and very defensive. Many are also highly committed. They are up against a system that condemns them when they are seen to be too zealous—and condemns them again when they fail to remove children to a place of safety. They are also subject to the horrors of social work fashion, the current mantras being “good enough parenting and “capacity building” in families. This is all fine stuff, but it is founded on the belief that parents are (almost) always the best option for their children. This clearly isn’t true in a number of cases, and the risk assessment system is picking up too few. Social workers are also hampered because they know how inadequate and under-funded the foster care system is—and hesitate to remove children into a system which doesn’t guarantee good care. Despite all this—and I see the perils of their situation—they, too, should examine their consciences.

In life, Baby P was used as a punchbag by unscrupulous adults. Now, in death, his fate continues. He died: and he deserved far, far better than an unseemly political row. What matters now is for those who feel responsible to resign—and I, for one, don’t care if they knocked on the door or were part of the systemic failure at any of the agencies responsible for safeguarding the right of all our nation’s infants to a childhood safe from torture and untimely death.

Katharine Quarmby is a contributing editor at Prospect and was fostered and adopted in the late 1960s.