BishopAccountability.org
	We Too Need a Truth Commission on Child Abuse Guardian May 22, 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/22/babyp-child-abuse While Ireland has faced up to the scale of society's mistreatment of children, Britain is stuck in denial and blame In the mid nineties, Ireland's genial premier, Albert Reynolds, a great player in the peace process, fell on his sword. His attorney general had failed to response to evidence of childhood abuse. It wasn't Reynolds fault, but he picked up the buck. This was perhaps the only time in history that childhood adversity brought down a government. That moment was consummated this week by the Ryan report, examining why abuse by the Catholic church had been tolerated by the state. This report gave a measure of Ireland's modernisation: the reform of its political culture is, among much else, connected to the nation's conversation with itself about what children have endured from adults. In Britain, by contrast, the child protection system has tottered from crisis to crisis. The UK story began with a child's terrible life and death, in conditions that echo the case of Baby P. Louis Blom-Cooper's inquiry into the 1984 death of Jasmine Beckford transformed children's services: the state took the side of children; social work became an enlightened, empathetic and empowered profession. British paediatricians made world-class discoveries about the hazardous lives of children whose bodies told stories, of intrusion and cruelty that had been, until then, literally unspeakable. Child protection was then no longer a clerical function of the "cruelty man", it became a subtle child-centred project. But the system could not withstand the resistance of accused adults and their advocates, nor could it cope with the unsettling evidence of scale. While Ireland was taking testimony from survivors, Britain was disdaining them, blaming them for making up all sorts of nonsense. Again, in the mid 1990s, the NSPCC tried to set the record straight with a national inquiry that calculated that around a million children were impoverished, injured and abused. But any hope that the new Labour government would place children at the centre of social justice were dashed when New Labour rubbished the NSPCC's findings. A "light touch" was urged upon social work. When this was united with the mantra of the Children Act (2004), "partnership with parents", the outcome was predictable: it became inevitable that more children would die and suffer harm and humiliation. A banal interpretation of light touch and "partnership with parents" facilitated New Labour's mission to get children of the child protection register, out of care, back into families. Equally, its resistance to the Zero Tolerance campaign on men's violence consigned many women and children to domestic danger zones. Lord Lamming contributed to the inevitable outcome by bureaucratising child welfare and by reinventing the "administrative method" of earlier times. In almost all of the controversial cases, which invariably send the system reeling, there is an ill or broken woman unable to protect herself and her children from a monstrously violent man. In the Baby P case, the mother will be shamed and blamed, but she has been known to social services since her own childhood. What interventions – the help, support and advice that would have enabled her to be a better parent – did not happen to protect her and her child from this tragic outcome? And what of the baby's torturer? He was on file, and was known to be dangerous. But we now know the system did not make protection from him a priority. And what is this system? Buckled and bowed, children's welfare is now increasingly managed not by social workers but by bureaucrats migrating from education – which has already bought the business model. This is exemplified by the Baby P story. The contrast could not be plainer: Ireland discovered something important about itself through the lens of its commission into child abuse. Ireland has told itself the hard truth while Britain has doomed itself to not knowing. We don't need heads spiked on public railings; we need to follow Ireland's example, and do the difficult thing: open ourselves to the causes, contexts and consequences of childhood adversity; make children's pain powerful by giving it a voice. The British system is bust. We, too, need a truth commission.
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