Twenty years ago, Britain was confronted with the horror of what can happen when the child protection system fails. Victoria Climbié, a “happy, smiling, enthusiastic little girl”, was tortured to death over a period of months by her relatives, in the worst-ever case of child abuse the professionals who investigated her death had seen. The government ordered an inquiry into how she was failed so monumentally by the professionals whose job it was to understand the danger she was in. Lord Laming, its chair, wrote that he hoped that the memory of Victoria would act as “a beacon pointing the way to securing the safety and wellbeing of all children in our society”.
Many changes have been made in the years since that report was published. Yet children still lose their lives in the most horrific of circumstances as a result of abuse and neglect. Last year, convictions were secured for the dreadful murders of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and 16-month-old Star Hobson. Just in the last week, a court found that five-year-old Logan Mwangi had been murdered by his mother and stepfather, and the mother of seven-year-old Hakeem Hussain was convicted of his manslaughter. Logan suffered a “slow and painful death”, after months of abuse and being imprisoned in a dungeon-like bedroom. Hakeem endured abject neglect from a mother with a drug addiction problem and suffocated to death in freezing conditions during an asthma attack while she was high on drugs.
