Is this child protection?

Will anybody see common sense in the way we are protecting our children? SPTC's Judith Gillespie wrote to "The Herald" newspaper.

How do we really deal with child protection? I ask this because on Friday you ran a worrying front page article on the shortage of social workers needed to care and protect vulnerable children. Then, over the weekend the Children’s Commissioner warned of the risk of driving people away from frontline services if the people who did this very difficult job were always blamed when things went wrong.

In contrast to these very real and practical difficulties relating to children who are actually at risk, I found myself ploughing through the latest consultation on the child protection agenda. This is the process whereby hundreds of thousands of people who want to work with children have their police records checked just to see if they are one of the hundred or so people on the register of those deemed unfit to work with children. According to the consultation, Disclosure Scotland currently processes around 500,000 applications a year, representing a very high percentage of the adult population. There has to be a more efficient system.

The latest consultation has both good news and bad news. The good news is that it proposes streamlining the disclosure process so that once someone has been checked, subsequent checks can be done more quickly. It also proposes setting up a central bureau so that decisions on people’s records are standardised. However, the bad news is that the checking requirement will be extended to those who handle sensitive records, for example database operators (we’ll ignore the complexities caused by the fact that database operators are often agency staff); it will be extended to all those currently in post; it will be extended to cover all those people who care for vulnerable adults and it will be made available to individual parents who want to check up on their child’s music teachers. This will greatly expand the need for disclosure and the number being handled by Disclosure Scotland could well double.

One of the more bizarre aspects of this consultation is that it defines a vulnerable adult as being aged 16 but a child as someone up to the age of 18 years. The child definition brings in all kinds of people who might think they were operating in an adult world – people who conduct wedding ceremonies, for example and have the records of bride and groom or universities that admit youngsters from the age of 17 years. But just to prove how consistent the proposals are, the one to one relationship between a working electrician and his/her apprentice is excluded because this is a situation of employment which falls outside the definition of child care. Whether workplaces that keep records on young people will be excluded from the database checking requirement is not clear.

This is a complex, costly and bureaucratic structure targeted at a very low risk. The introduction to the consultation rightly points out the opportunity costs of investing in this procedure and I quote, “expenditure on these proposals, whether incurred by the Executive or other bodies, will be met from money which could have, for example, been spent on frontline service delivery or other measures which have an impact on the safety and quality of life of vulnerable groups” So that’s it in a nutshell. How should we spend our money – frontline services or a complex checking system? Given the recent headlines about the shortage of social workers common sense would indicate that this should be the top priority. However, this mention of opportunity costs is no more than a nod in the direction of common sense. The child protection industry is driving forward in an SUV convoy and no one dare stand in its way. For a start, the Scottish decision has to be comparable with the English decision, so even if Scotland wanted to put the resources into frontline services, that would not be allowed unless England made a similar decision. Moreover, the need for such checks has become a kind of mantra which is never put through any kind of reality check. Forget the fact that it is impossible to think of any major case that would have been stopped by this process; forget the fact that the bulk of child abuse cases happen within the domestic situation (family and friends) and are not affected by this legislation; forget the fact that the process offers no protection against either disastrous chance encounters nor against predators who have so far managed not to be caught; above all forget the fact that money spent here is not available to be spent on frontline services. The process offers a bureaucratic comfort to the system and so it will go ahead because the system has to be kept safe.

A copy of this letter was printed in "The Herald" on Tuesday 14th March 2006.

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