News

When the two highly sensitive areas of race and intervention collide social services can be too scared to act for fear of being labelled racist. Which is a perverse form of anti-racism, says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

The Laming Inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie opened with a torrent of emotion and harsh words. Only to be expected. The hopeful little girl in her red dress and pearl earrings, her hair tied in little bunches, went through gruesome torture over the last year of her short life. Victoria's great aunt Marie Therese Kouao and her boyfriend Carl Manning were found guilty of her murder. Meanwhile the usual demands have re-surfaced which I find particularly unpalatable at present. Instead of real, honest self-examination, the spokespeople for social services are demanding more money and less criticism in order not to repeat the mistakes which were made in this case.

Victoria's parents had sent her here from the Ivory Coast with a trusted blood relative to get a British education. In 10 months their daughter was dead. She had been in contact with 70 professional care providers and there had been more than a dozen points of intervention which might have saved her. Victoria's parents are still trying to understand how this could have happened to their daughter in what they believed to be a civilised country where we have child protection laws and institutions.

This touching faith in British child care services, which few native Britons now actually share after so many sad cases of abused and dead children, are held strongly across Africa and many other "third world" countries. The hundreds of unaccompanied children who arrive daily as asylum seekers come here because their families have heard that we have systems in place to look after children in need. I have talked on the phone to a couple of these parents and remained silent when they said that they knew their children would be fine in "the best country in the world." I hope that they will not have cause to regret the agonising decisions they have made to part with their sons and daughters and I wonder if those providing child care in this country can be relied upon as much as these parents think.

Victoria was a black African child living with a black couple. When one looks back at the list of other such fatal cases, a number of the dead children were black or mixed race. Others were white so I am not making any racist accusations.

We must not forget that the case of Lauren Wright also shocked us recently. She was killed, in a lovely little Norfolk village where people knew that she was being treated with systematic abuse and unfathomable cruelty by her stepmother and with the collusion of Lauren's own father. The reason I think the racial identity issue is important is because I feel there is a greater reluctance to intervene when there is perceived child abuse within black and Asian families in Britain.

The reasons for this are usually laudable, but the results are often catastrophic. Once upon a time all black and Asian families were pathologised because they did not fit white middle class norms. I remember going to the home of a Bangladeshi family in Newham with a social worker in the 1980s and arguing with her views that the children needed to be "watched" because they had no normal toys and were instead playing with kitchen utensils. Children were taken from families for spurious reasons often because of deep racial prejudices.

But today we have the opposite problem. A number of white professionals and agencies tread too cautiously for fear of being thought racist or cultural supremacists. Others appear to have lost all judgement when it comes to black and Asian clients. To make matters worse, many black and Asian professionals behave as though their communities have been anointed and are only ever good and pure. I cannot help wondering if this is an issue which has tactfully been left out of the Climbie post-mortem.

While researching my book Mixed Feelings, The Complex Lives of Mixed Race Britons, I found shocking levels of trust and complacency when it came to placing mixed race children with black and Asian families. Standards became more flexible. Other interventions were avoided too. I had to report two cases of alleged physical abuse within mixed race families to higher authorities because the social workers did nothing. In one case a black stepfather was beating up his white stepchild and in the other a white teenage sibling was terrorising his young mixed race half sister. If we really want to protect vulnerable black children like Victoria, it is time to address this perverse sort of anti-racism.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a journalist and broadcaster.