Why Baby P was doomed to die

The everyday detail is the most heartbreaking. A cheerful shirt printed with fish and sailing boats lies stained with blood next to a grubby vest. These are the clothes that Baby P once wore and the only relics of normality from a brief and agonising life.

His death, at 17 months, is not simply a chronicle of private savagery. His is the story of how a baby can be tortured and killed in the full glare of officialdom in a country that thinks itself among the most compassionate on earth.

He was visited 60 times by health professionals and social workers; or roughly twice a week for the nine months he was on the child protection register. His mother was arrested twice, but no one appeared to question her boast that she was "a damn good mum".

People saw things. Someone watched Baby P eat dirt in the garden. Someone noticed that his meals were bits of broken biscuits scavenged from older children. Someone must have registered the ripped-off fingertips and the scabs and bruises caused by blows so severe that a tooth was smashed and found in his stomach.

But some collective blindness, or neighbourhood omerta, afflicted all witnesses to his torment, including the paediatrician who did not diagnose his broken back and eight fractured ribs.

Two days later, baby P was found stiff and blue in his blood-spattered cot. This week, his mother's boyfriend and a family lodger, Jason Owen, were convicted at the Old Bailey of causing or allowing his death; a charge previously admitted by his unnamed mother.

Normally, the public lament of "Never Again" follows such children to their graves. That epitaph cannot be applied to Baby P. He died almost within screaming distance of the house where Victoria Climbié met her death eight years ago. Haringey council is back in the frame, and so are the vast reforms ordered by the Government in the wake of the Laming inquiry.

Yesterday, in an ill-tempered PMQs, Gordon Brown promised a second review by Lord Laming and accused David Cameron of playing politics. Announcing an urgent joint review by the chief inspectors of Ofsted, Health and Constabulary, Children's Secretary Ed Balls called the case "tragic and appalling". Beverley Hughes, minister for children, told me of her bafflement at the "pervasive belief" among professionals that Baby P was neglected not abused. "We cannot say that we cannot protect such children," she said.

No wonder that ministers are horrified by a case that is, in many ways, worse than Climbié. The tragedy of Baby P should have been a death foretold. Yet no resignations were offered by Haringey, and no heads may roll. Some apologists imply that, with social workers burdened by paperwork, the verdict on Baby P should read: death by bureaucracy.

That excuse will not do. As Wes Cuell, acting director of the NSPCC, says: "This isn't about any lack of time, awareness, resources or manpower. But the child still ended up dead."

The first question is whether the vast shift in the architecture of children's services after the Laming report has helped those at gravest risk. Many have their doubts. Last month the spending watchdog, the Audit Commission, reported shortfalls in bringing together the relevant professions under the umbrella of "children's trusts". The move had, in the commission's view, created a recipe for confusion.

Earlier this year, researchers at the University of East Anglia analysed 161 cases of abuse and neglect between 2003 and 2005. Two-thirds of the children died and the rest had serious injuries. Around half the children were under a year old and more than 50 per cent were known to social services at the time of the incident.

The report suggested that social workers had not learnt Laming's lessons. Why? One answer is that ministers, while (commendably) putting money into improving the lives of many children, may actually have put the most vulnerable in greater peril. "The Government has subverted the term 'at risk' ", says Terri Dowty of Action on Rights for Children. "It's been dangerously blurred."

Children are said to be "at risk" of teenage pregnancy or becoming criminals. Welfare is becoming confused with protection. That means, according to Ms Dowty and others, that social workers are going into the worst homes as supportive friends, rather than as hard-nosed detectives intent on sleuthing out evidence for child abuse.

Cruel parents, cunning and manipulative, may make credulous professionals complicit in their cover-up. Baby P's mother hid not only her own neglect but the presence in her filthy, flea-infested home of a boyfriend whose interests were said to include torturing animals and skinning frogs alive before breaking their legs. Care workers found the dead mice and chicks he fed his pet snake but did not know he lived there.

There is a more sinister factor than lack of scepticism. Wes Cuell says that more cash-strapped local authorities are seeking informal minders, such as a grandma, for children at grave risk and fewer are applying for a care order. Leaving children with the family is not always best, but it's always cheapest.

The state is a grim parent. It fails its charges (children in care are eight times more likely than other children to be excluded from school), but it does not - as a rule - kill them. If tortured children are denied its shelter for lack of money, that is a woeful indictment of the fourth richest country on earth. While there is no suggestion that Baby P was left at home on grounds of cost, it is clear that his death is not an aberration.

Each year, 47 preschool children die at the hands of a parent or a carer - the very adults in whom they invest their trust and love. Such crimes are unthinkable, but they are also the product of a society that sees childhood through a distorting glass. This is supposedly an age of toxic childhood, in which adults hark back to a pre-lapsarian age. Children are imagined always to be in danger from the malevolent other. The adman and the retailer are, in the eyes of doom-mongers (Mr Cameron included) stealing their innocence.

In the popular myth, paedophiles and abductors lurk at every corner. In reality, there never was a golden age of childhood. The demons threatening the young are not evil outsiders but, most often, the fathers and the mothers brought up in dysfunctional families and wreaking the destruction they suffered on their own children.

When all children are thought to be in danger, then the few who are brutalised and murdered may go unnoticed and unrescued until some terrible event occurs. And then, as in the Case of Baby P, governments call for reviews, opposition politicians posture and declaim while citizens recoil in horror.

We have been here many times before. After Maria Caldwell in 1974 came Jasmin Beckford, Tyra Henry and a litany of other victims with sweet faces and hair combed for the school photographs that would decorate their obituaries. Each time, there were promises that such tragedies would never happen again. Each time they did.

The death of Baby P changes that pattern. He has no name that we can yet print. The only images so far are the one on this page, in which the child's face has been obscured for legal reasons and the dehumanised, computer-generated doll's heads showing the injuries inflicted to his skull. Reports of his death have tried to graft a personality on him. He was a stoical child, we learn, uncomplaining to visitors who never noticed that chocolate had been smeared on his face to disguise the bruises. Some people called him "Smiley".

Yet Baby P, anonymous but for such sparse details, was the most public of all the victims in Britain's canon of the dead. His brief life was chronicled in meticulous detail in case notes compiled by professionals who called almost as regularly as the postman. If they could not save him, who could they save?

As investigators begin their reviews, the one certainty is that a froth of moral righteousness directed at one authority will solve nothing. A country that pays too little heed to children's rights has also lost its ability to calibrate risk.

We are entitled to demand that the story of Baby P is never repeated, but history suggests that hope is fruitless and safeguards frail. Children will go on dying for as long as society continues to over-shelter those least at need while failing to protect the most defenceless.

Source: Telegraph