Who cares! It's just more proof of "social cycle theory"

Just over twenty years ago, towards the end of the Thatcher era, a UK Conservative government was fretting about how to steer its child protection policies through rough waters.

There had been a scandal in the county of Cleveland [1]: children were removed from their parents on the basis of questionable and, even now, hotly contested medical evidence that they were being sexually abused.

The courts found differently in the majority of cases, and the subsequent confusion and outcry about the invasion of private life were fierce enough to warrant a public judicial inquiry.

Afterwards, as was more customary at the time but seems extraordinarily meticulous in retrospect, the Department of Health commissioned a comprehensive range of studies from its list of "sound" university research group.

It instigated investigations into everything from the effects of suspicion on families to the incidence and prevalence of neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse and even of a rumor of Satanic abuse in the English shires.

At the outset, child sexual abuse having so suddenly become such a widespread, appalling public concern, there was a feeling that the existing social care system could not be expected to take the strain and that a new professional specialism was needed.

The accumulated findings were published in 1995 as the "blue book” Child Protection: Messages from research. A key conclusion was that child abuse, sexual, emotional or physical, though always terrible, was rare and that the needs of children and families in the general population were great but in too large part unmet. Its defense of the role of the family social worker and of the value of family support set the tone for much subsequent guidance and policy making.

In the detail, certain conclusions that sounded rather inconsequential at the time had far-reaching impact: for example, that children growing up in emotionally abrasive conditions of “low warmth and high criticism” were at considerable risk.

The interest in “parenting” as a transferable skill developed from that insight. Emerging convictions about the value of early intervention owe something to it, too.

Broadly, as far as possible meeting the needs of the many was considered a saner and ultimately more fruitful priority than focusing on the detail of particular incidents or obsessively pursuing neglectful and abusive parents (all of whom would once have been less dangerously in need themselves).

So cases of separation and the demand for substitute care would and should henceforth diminish, and monitoring the changing needs of children and families would call for more skillful and more meaningful case record keeping. From the mid-1990s onward that was the gist.

A dozen paragraphs of potted history cannot approach the ramifications of twenty uneven years of children’s services policy making. There have been more tragic child deaths and other public inquiries along the way.

But before the case of Baby Peter erupted in the London Borough of Haringey and before the Director of Children’s Services Sharon Shoesmith was sacked for “being there”, the prevailing preventive wind in UK child protection policy seemed unaltered.

Which is why veterans of the “blue book” years may have been jolted yesterday by news in Children and Young People Now [2] and elsewhere of “a dramatic increase in care applications” that is overstretching the children's care system and “could lead to cuts in preventative, therapeutic support”.

The source was the Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service (Cafcass), whose figures for July to September 2009 show that care applications were up by nearly 50 per cent (688 cases) compared with the same period in 2008 – and that in June the tally of 784 was the highest ever recorded in a single month.

They were calling it the "Baby Peter effect". Councils were referring lower-level concerns for fear of making a mistake by “under-reacting”. It was causing a drain on resources that was forcing councils and court advisers to focus funding on children with the highest levels of immediate need.

Cafcass chief executive Anthony Douglas was quoted as saying, “This risks a reduction in the very family support and therapeutic services a much larger group of children and families need to prevent the cycle of neglect recurring”.

Not to mention the risk of stroke among a previous generation of social researchers.