Child protection

The Government has failed to take up numerous opportunities to address comprehensively the many significant deficiencies in arrangements for keeping children safe. The latest opportunity came with Lord Laming’s March 2009 review of child protection and safeguarding arrangements and the Government’s subsequent response to its 58 recommendations, published two months later.

In outlining a programme of national and local government action to “reform” the child protection system, Children’s Secretary Ed Balls said: ‘This country has one of the best child protection systems in the world’.

Mike Lindsay, CRAE's national coordinator commenting on this statement said "CRAE believes this claim is seriously over-stated. Whilst there have undoubtedly been several positive developments in child protection, with both practice and policy moving on in important ways, the state of the child protection system in this country remains deeply troubling, and unfit for purpose in many respects."

Only a small proportion of children who are abused are ever reported to statutory child protection agencies, and referrals by children themselves form an even smaller number. Referrals receive widely different responses and some serious cases are underplayed or even missed. Many child and adult survivors who have reported abuse to the authorities remain critical of the help they received, and a high proportion may be left regretting ever having disclosed abuse. Feeling that they were not listened to emerged as a cause of real frustration and disappointment for children and young people, and had a profound impact on how safe they felt.  

The care system is an integral part of child protection in this country. It therefore has to be of sufficient quality and safety to offer genuine options for keeping children safe. On 12 March 2009, the Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls, told the House of Commons: No barrier, no bureaucracy, no buck-passing should ever get in the way of keeping children safe. Concerns about the adequacy of public care continue to act as just such a barrier.

• Safeguarding processes remain characteristically impersonal and highly formalised, giving too little encouragement to children to come forward and seek the help and protection they may need.

• Local authority staff are broadly unaware of the provisions of section 53 of the Children Act 2004: the duty to ascertain, as far as is practicable, the wishes and feelings of the child. If children and young people cannot learn to trust the system to do what is right by them, then many will continue to make choices that are ultimately worse for them.

CRAE welcomes the Government’s focus on improving the child protection system. However, we believe that the Government has failed to recognise the need for a culture of understanding and respect for children’s human rights as the framework for keeping children safe. We are still a very long way from achieving the rights-based approach to child protection that would genuinely make the best interests of the child the paramount consideration.

What might a rights-based approach look like?

1. It would ensure that we always prioritise ‘best interests’ over ‘best value’, and ring-fenced the resources necessary to make this happen
2. It would respect choices that children made, including about who they choose to tell
3. It would offer children who needed it “facilitative confidentiality”, on a risk-assessed basis, to enable them to discuss problems without fear of triggering the consequences of a full-scale child protection response
4. It would ensure that children did not become secondary victims of the system, such as by only ever losing out on their family home, on contact with siblings or their place in school as a last resort
5. It would ensure that children had access to properly trained and supervised social workers being allowed to get on with the job, including having their professional judgments for keeping children safe supported by the system.