News

Our regular panel comments on a topic in the news.

The inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie began last week with inquiry chairperson Lord Laming saying that the girl's suffering would be an "enduring turning point for securing proper protection of children in this country".

Inquiry counsel Neil Garnham QC said that Victoria had died a "miserable and lonely death". ```Victoria's parents, Francis and Berthe Climbie, who were attending the inquiry, claimed on BBC radio that their daughter would still have been alive if social services and the police had done their job.

The inquiry will examine the extent to which four social services departments, four health trusts and authorities, and the Metropolitan Police were responsible for Victoria's death. "There were at least 12 chances for the agencies charged with duties of child protection to have saved her," Garnham said.

We asked our new regular panel of commentators for their views on the state of child protection services, whether they are being stretched to breaking point, and whether we expect too much as a society of child protection workers.

Bill Badham, programme manager, Children's Society
"More staff, better training, procedures and partnership working will not be enough. We need a culture of respect for children that helps them speak out, knowing they will be heard and responded to. Children have called for: a children's rights commissioner to champion their rights; the same protection as adults by ending "reasonable chastisement" to justify smacking children; and access to an independent person to hear and respond to their complaints at the earliest stage."

Martin Green, chief executive, Counsel and Care for the Elderly
"The inquiry into the tragic death of Victoria Climbie will no doubt highlight a range of failures by both the system and individuals. However, what I doubt it will do is address the complex and often contradictory expectations that society has of social workers, or leave the general public any better informed about the difficulties of balancing rights with risks, which is the daily challenge for many social workers. We must learn lessons from the Climbie case and one of them should be to stop having the unrealistic expectation that there will never be failures in an under-resourced and demoralised profession."

Felicity Collier, chief executive, BAAF
"This is the saddest child abuse case to hit the headlines for years. It will shake public confidence in social services at a critical time for the future of the profession. We must learn from this inquiry. We know that social workers successfully protect many children every single day. We know social work is under siege; we know recruitment is in crisis, but we cannot shirk from taking responsibility for our failures as well as our successes."

Bob Hudson, principal research fellow, Nuffield Institute for Health, University of Leeds
"The labour supply problems in child protection parallel those in adult care, and can be traced back to the vilification of social work and the denigration of the public sector ethic in the 1980s. Staff are offered relatively poor pay and prospects, but when things go wrong are hounded for being insufficiently professional. There is a recruitment crisis in social work. An imaginative solution is needed, covering ways of enhancing status as well as improving pay and conditions."

Julia Ross, social services director and primary care trust chief executive, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
"Of course, we can't stop parents hurting their children, no system can. And of course we're desperately short of experienced, skilled social workers, but that's nothing new and it is not the whole story. So what's different? I think it can seem worse because we're driving standards and expectations up and up. Nobody can argue against that but it does cause huge pressures and we don't as yet have the people resources to deal with it."