Selecting Your Scapegoats...

In recent days and weeks more small lost lives have been added to this grim toll: Logan Mwangi, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, Star Hobson, Kyrell Matthews and Hakeem Hussain. In each case, decisions were taken that led to missed opportunities to protect these children – but we don’t know why these decisions were made. That will be revealed in safeguarding reviews that are under way.

But Polly has an idea why... 

But we do know that lockdown put huge strains on families and made it harder for social workers to see what was going on.

Really? There were plenty of signs, they didn't miss them, they simply failed to do their job.  

But to fix this system, we have to decide what the problem that we’re fixing is – and make sure that the pandemic doesn’t mask the longer-term trends.

And what would those be? 

I spent three years researching the children’s social care system for my book and found a system that is so decimated by austerity, the relationship between communities and the authorities now so corrupted by distrust, that in some parts of the country it is no longer able to identify the children most at risk.

Ah, yes. They don't have enough resources. It couldn't possibly be anything else, could it? 

In the absence of the capacity to make sound judgments, systems have been put in place that reduce nuanced, human judgment to tick-box exercises that devious parents can see straight through and outmanoeuvre.

Do any of the parents in these cases strike you as the sort of cunning high-IQ manipulators who should be able to pull the wool over the eyes of dedicated trained professionals? Because it never seems so to me... 

A good social care system would take faster, more decisive action to protect children: take them away from abusive families and offer better support and services to help other families stay together safely.

I'd settle for one that could reasonably distinguish between those two subsets with any degree of accuracy...