From Child Protection to Cowardice

Reflections on a brilliantly difficult discussion at Battle of Ideas

I recently spoke at the Battle of Ideas debate From grooming gangs to child abuse: is social work working? and want to share a few reflections on how it went. Sadly, I couldn’t be there for the whole weekend and won’t be at the follow-up Battle of Ideas Festival in Buxton where they’ll be discussing From grooming gangs to child protection: a scandal in plain sight? But, if it’s anything like the debate at Church House in Westminster, it will be a genuinely fascinating if tricky session.

In my introduction, I made the case (as I did on here) for putting the awful deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson in context. I pointed out that the numbers of serious incident notifications, children with child protection plans, and children in need are all on a downward trend. My co-panellist Susie Hawkes, senior lecturer in social work at the University of Wolverhampton, similarly made a point about the UK’s low rate of abuse when compared with other countries.

I explained that the disturbing phenomenon of grooming gangs is different in as much as, beyond the various local enquiries, we simply don’t know the extent of the problem. This, as it did for other speakers, would prove an area of contention with some in the audience.

I had a few things to say about the findings of the Child Protection in England and Independent Review of Children’s Social Care reports (as I did on here). While I have some problems with social work, social work isn’t the problem here. There is no evidence to suggest that social work practise in particular has got any worse. These latest reports, like every other report concerned with the awful tragedies that punctuate the decades, come to the same old conclusions.

A failure of professionals to share information with each other and to work in a sufficiently coordinated fashion, inadequate expertise, and too many barriers put in the way of social workers and their clients. All of these add to the dangers faced by the small minority of children and young people at risk of coming to harm, on top of those emanating from the adults mistreating them.

Whether as a cause or a consequence of the problems faced by children’s social care - perhaps both - there is a high turnover of social workers. While there are more now than there were five years ago, more are leaving the profession, and creating more vacancies too. Few of those who fill them stick around long enough to develop a relationship with a child or family, or to get on top of a 16-child average caseload. Much of which they are expected to manage from behind their desks.

I went on to talk about the impact of the response of the authorities - particularly local authorities - to the pandemic. I made the point that the virus didn’t lock anything or anyone down, or close vital services that those in greatest need depend on. COVID-19 didn’t stop social work visits to children at risk of abuse or neglect either. But still those things happened. This was a policy choice made with predictably catastrophic consequences.

A large drop in children in the care system finding adoptive families, and in schools relaying their safeguarding concerns. An increase in serious incidents (including deaths) involving neglect or abuse. How many of these were a consequence of a school closure or a social work visit missed? The implementation of ‘Covid-safe practice’ put already vulnerable children in greater danger. The child, for the first time since the Children Act 1989 came into force, was no longer ‘paramount’. The virus took precedent.

I wound up my introduction by asking what we mean by safeguarding. I answered my own question. Only people (not systems or processes) can protect or safeguard children from harm. Indeed, the State - like Covid - can sometimes exacerbate families’ existing problems. Co-panellist Rakib Ehsan, author and commentator on racial identity and social integration, argued that a decline in traditional values and a rise in family breakdown have an inevitable impact on children’s wellbeing.

Like Covid, the State can also create problems of its own. Tom Bewick, chief executive of Federation of Awarding Bodies, drew on his own experience growing up in the care system. He also draw attention to the attainment gap for so-called ‘looked after’ children. There is ample evidence that the State does a bad job of looking after these young people. Not only are they very unlikely to go to university. They are also much more likely than any other child to end up homeless or in prison.

In other words, while the State has a tendency to gorge itself on our social and cultural problems, it doesn’t necessarily solve them. It can make them worse too. It has recently crowded-out community initiative, created a climate of fear in response to the pandemic; and fostered community divisions through its embrace of an ideology that puts difference and separation above equality and solidarity.

Which brings me to group-based child sexual exploitation i.e. grooming gangs. There was a degree of discomfort in the audience, and the panel were accused of not giving the issue the attention it deserves. I have some sympathy for this position. You could argue that this particularly concerning development in the UK - or, more accurately, in England - could easily take up an entire weekend’s discussion and debate of its own. And there’d still be unanswered questions.

It is in a different category to the abuse suffered by Arthur and Star, in as much as it is less a consequence of poor child protection arrangements; than a disturbing outgrowth of community dysfunction and identity politics combined with an outrageous unwillingness on the part of local institutions to take the problem seriously. It is rightly regarded as a scandal (or series of scandals) on a par with any other incident of abuse or neglect the country has seen, and probably on a much larger scale.

It doesn’t happen ‘behind closed doors’. It happens on our streets, in the taxi ranks and take aways of our urban centres, at the heart of our communities. Which is why the careful maintenance of the informal bonds that make up our communities is so vital. Or what I referred to on Saturday as an ‘early warning system’. It is via this unofficial but very real safeguarding mechanism, that we are able to tell when something is going (or about to go) badly wrong.

In the case of the grooming gangs, and in other areas too, it clearly isn’t working. The decommissioning of community action, the promotion and spread of anxiety and suspicion, the pluralising of a single community into multiple (and sometimes hostile) ethnic and religious communities - each of these has weakened people’s awareness of, and capacity to respond to, safeguarding concerns. It makes protecting children much, much harder.

A member of the audience agreed with me that safeguarding is the ‘job of the community’. As I said, this is not to say that the State mustn’t step in on occasion. Sometimes there is no alternative. But for the most part, it is we, not it, who must step in. Which is perhaps why one accusation from an audience member echoed through the debates and discussions I heard that weekend - on panels, in audiences and over drinks.

The accusation was of ‘cowardice’. A sense that those who hold power and influence, and who make decisions that affect us all, are not tackling society’s problems because they are too afraid - whether for their own careers or out of a misplaced political correctness. I’d go further. I think we are all, more or less, implicated. The aversion to intervening is society-wide. The adults, you might say, have vacated the room. Or are perhaps hiding behind the furniture in the hope that the monster - a monster they had a part in creating - goes away on its own.

It won’t. Somehow, despite all of the blows landed on our sense of belonging and on our connections with each other as fellow citizens, we need to learn to trust ourselves again. That is the only way we are going to trust each other within and across our communities, with the responsibility for looking out for - and intervening on behalf of - each other's kids.