by Charles Pragnell
The
Laming report reminded me of the old adage :-
“Pursuing structural change as a means of solving organisational
problems is as vain as the search for the philosopher’s stone…….
If you change attitudes, structures will look after themselves, and
if you can’t then no structure will do the job for you..”.
I’m
afraid Laming, like many others before him, made the fundamental error
of limiting the Inquiry to a simplistic : something has gone wrong,
so it’s just a matter of finding out what it was and fixing
it. And again he fell into the trap of blaming “the System”.
Interestingly
he found a failure on the part of the professionals involved to communicate
with each other was the major problem. One would have thought that
after nearly sixty years of inquiries (since Dennis O’Neill
in 1946), people in child protection would have learnt how to talk
to each other, especially as after all of these inquiries changes
were made in “the System”.
However,
Victoria Climbie did not die because of failures in “the System”,
much as the child abuse industry would want us to believe, - and Laming
did a pretty good job for them in deflecting blame. Victoria Climbie
died because of the failure of certain individual child protection
workers to carry out their statutory duties and through the failures
of their managers to ensure they carried out their duties and responsibilities.
The
Government’s Green Paper is another deckchair-shuffling exercise
and a hotch-potch of half baked ideas and does not begin to address
the problems in the child abuse industry which is now erratic, dysfunctional,
oppressive and punitive.
My
greatest concern in the Green Paper is the recommendation that there
should be a national database of every child and family in the country
and that it would be accessible to every Police Force, Social Services
Department, Health Authority, Education Authority, Probation Service
and voluntary organisation involved in children’s services.
I
am greatly concerned (horrified) at the creation of this database
which the Government is covertly trying to slip through as an alternative
to a national ID Card scheme (which Blunkett and Straw failed to get
Cabinet support for in 1998, and which the Government will get it
on the cheap under this solution, as Social Services Departments,
Health Authorities and Education Authorities will do all of the work.
*
Why is such a database of 11 million children and their families necessary
in the first place for the 7,500 children per year who are suspected
by social workers of being abused!
Some
of the intended information on the database raises major concerns
and although the information initially required may look largely innocuous,
it is a database which can be developed at any time to include other
information, once the basic info has been put in place.
*
How secure will the information be?. A paedophile hacker or someone
who pays an employee with access could get the names and addresses
of every child in a geographical area or in the whole country within
seconds. Commercial companies will no doubt be very interested for
targeting potential customers and bombard people with junk mail and
SPAM. They have already got email addresses from ISP sites so this
would be very easy for them.
*
Who will have access to all of this personal information ? School
clerks and caretakers? Receptionists in doctor's surgeries? Clerks
in Social Services Departments? It will be an enormous risk putting
this amount of information into the hands of some people with the
potential to misuse such information and to sell it.
*
What provision is there for data subjects to be able to alter, amend
or erase data on the national database? Experiences of people who
have been involved with Social Services and Health or Medical Services
has shown that it is virtually impossible to get records changed in
any way whatsoever, - even factual information such as dates of birth,
family names, etc. There is also a worrying incidence of personal
records (particularly medical records) being altered or just disappearing
if the agency or an individual worker has made an error.
The
death of Victoria Climbie was a terrible tragedy, but it is being
used by certain people in the child abuse industry to gain enormous
amounts of information about every family in the country and using
the unfortunate, preventable and avoidable death of one child and
the incompetence of one of their own workers as the reason for doing
so.
What
such a database does is place every child in the country on a continuum
of need, with the requirement for services such as education, health,
and social services at one end, and the risk of child abuse at the
other. It will be but a few short steps along the continuum, especially
where truancy, offending behaviour, drug use, lone female parent,
low income, alcoholism, etc. feature on a family's personal records.
If
the database goes ahead, we can expect far more false accusations
of child abuse and many more families unnecessarily drawn into child
protection procedures via assessment processes with the well-documented
emotional harm to those children and families caused by such an intrusion
into their lives. Currently assessment processes to ration and limit
local authority resources are taking up massive amounts of those resources
and at the end of their assessments many children and their families
are receiving nothing in the way of services.
The
database proposal needs far, far more public and political debate
and discussion, and, if it is to proceed, then cast iron assurances
are needed to address the dangers listed above.
