Prepare yourselves, as best you can, for a serious outbreak of hand-wringing and moral outrage. The case of the ten and twelve-year-old brothers guilty of a particularly terrible assault on two younger children in South Yorkshire will provoke high emotion and anger in equal measure.
You will read on other pages what these children actually perpetrated: the violence, the brutality, the sexual abuse, the near-killing. The profound cruelty, in other words, of those who know of nothing else.
How can it be, people will demand to know, that in this affluent civilised society young children are still emerging as monstrous savages? Sixteen years on from the shadow of Jamie Bulger’s death; after nearly 13 years of new Labour and its emphasis on child poverty; and at a time when there has never been more money devoted to protection, education, testing, checking and child development strategies, how on earth could something like this happen?
But we know why. And there really is no point in getting emotional. This horror occurred because the system for intervention in the lives of neglected children is woefully inadequate and intellectually and economically flawed. Too late, too short-term, too wishy-washy, too cheapskate.
Dozens of people will have seen this particular horror coming for years. The police said yesterday that all the agencies had been involved with these children since an early age. Teachers, neighbours, social workers, police officers, health workers, parents — everyone who has had contact with the brothers since birth, probably — will have known trouble was looming. Since they were toddlers, in effect, they have been wearing labels screaming “Help me! lost child!” 5ft wide.
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You can put money on it that they have a record of exclusions from school. Equally, you can be sure they have grown up in a spectacularly dysfunctional family. You can speculate whether, as well as suffering from complex emotional and behavioural problems born of poor parenting, the boys are on the autistic spectrum and have poor speech and language skills.These boys had their fate written for them: perhaps from birth.
So there are no surprises, but that’s precisely my point. Everybody knew this, but nobody did anything. The authorities stayed in their silos, guarded their threadbare budgets, watched their backs and let the slow motion tragedy unfold. Why? Because that’s what the system decrees that they do.
The boys’ drug-addicted mother, apparently, had been pleading with Doncaster Council for some time for help, saying she couldn’t cope, but it was only three weeks before the attack that the boys were finally taken away and placed in a foster home. Where, lo and behold, they went right off the rails.
We may never know, but I would bet the council had stalled the mother for ages, a tactic motivated less by incompetence than by the fact it lacked the funds or the facilities to deal with these extremely troubled children.
The mother may even have tried to get her sons a statement of special educational needs, the statutory instrument that forces a council to deal with difficult children — perhaps by sending them to a specialist residential boarding school. But, as child lawyers operating in Haringey and elsewhere will tell you, obtaining such statements can take up to two scandalous years and several tribunal appearances, because cash-strapped councils do everything in their power to resist assessing children.
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By the time they cave in, it is too late. The children are probably in young offender’s institutions and headed for prison’s revolving door. From the council’s point of view, job done; someone else’s problem.
A growing number of people are waking up to the craziness of all this. A couple of months ago, I wrote about the illogicalities of mourning Baby P, a victim of neglect, while turning our backs on the Baby Ps who survive but become feral brats. It provoked a strong response from those in key agencies who have known for some time that the situation had to change.
People in high places know that all the box ticking in the world will not solve the problems of short-termism. Instead of intervening early and effectively, struggling local authorities wait until children are in crisis, and then act reluctantly, half-heartedly and ineffectively. It’s not their fault: the funding systems are designed in such a way that they can only shepherd the problem along until it is old enough to father babies of its own and perpetuate the misery.
Underpinning all this is the over-liberal doctrine, enshrined in social work legislation, that parents’ rights to keep their children at home, however catastrophically they neglect them, precede the rights of the child to be treated well. Underpinning it too is a welfare system that, like it or not, rewards child bearing.
Ultimately, this results in a tragic waste of young — and getting younger — lives. Investigations by The Times have found that the rate of very young children being excluded from primary schoolis growing at 7 per cent a year. Do we need any more of a spur?
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The big question is whether any political party is willing to take a long-term view and effect radical reform. The business case is economically sturdy: if authorities intervene early and spend a lot of money then on parenting and treating the small numbers of children at risk, this will, according to US research (British figures are being drawn up at present), cost the taxpayer up to 17 times less than keeping someone in the criminal justice system.
Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, believes that early intervention is critical: that children must be helped before their third birthday to be saved. Can he convince David Cameron of the political merits of such a courageous, compassionate policy shift? We must cross our fingers and hope.