CHILD PROTECTION

The shocking case of the abused children in Lewis and the length of time it took to help them prompted Judith Gillespie to write to "The Herald".

Dear Sir,

Like many others, I read with horror the details of the abuse case in Lewis. As the mother of three (now adult) children, I find it unbearable that three young children should suffer so much. It is also shocking that despite the children being on the at-risk register, the social worker being appalled at the conditions they were living in and the children regularly turning up at school with injuries that did not coincide with the normal bumps and scrapes of childhood, it took so long to bring their ordeal to an end. You have to wonder what is the point of all the official procedures if it still takes people so long to react.

This then led me to think of the latest bureaucratic nonsense – the Protection of Children Scotland Act (POCSA). This sets up another register – this time a list of those deemed unfit to work with children – and requires everyone appointing someone to a childcare position to check that that person is not on this list. The definition of a childcare position is so wide that it includes a new University lecturer who may lecture to 17 year-old students, Sunday school teachers, parents organising a series of school discos, Dads running the local football training, as well as the more obvious person who works in a children’s home.

The cost of this exercise runs into millions of pounds with the costs being carried both by the organisations required to have the checks done and the agencies responsible for carrying out the checks. However, despite all the expense and the massive bureaucracy, the Lewis abuse case would not have been caught up in POCSA in any way.

The mega-spend on the child protection procedures arising from POCSA affect areas of activity that are exceedingly low risk but completely exclude the area of highest risk to children – the domestic situation. However, it was interesting in the recent report on the increase in the number of people working in the public sector to note that the number of civil servants had increased as the number of social workers had decreased.

With all this focus on lists and more lists, it is important to ask whether in matters of child protection we have really got our priorities right.

Yours sincerely
Judith Gillespie
Development Manager
Scottish Parent Teacher Council

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