This week is Safeguarding Awareness Week and in order to help celebrate it, I thought it would be useful to remind the thinking public that safeguarding culture has not actually made children safer. In fact, since safeguarding was rolled out in this country, children have become demonstrably less safe. Across all metrics Britain’s children are worse off than previously: child sexual exploitation has increased, injuries done to children have gone up, more children are suffering with bad mental health and with more serious conditions and more children are being taken into care. Quite simply, the institutional emphasis on safeguarding rather than the enforcement of the law, enables crime and the neglect of children to flourish.
Think of any recent monstrosity involving the harm of children: the slaughter of girls in Southport, the raping of tens of thousands of children by rape gangs, knife crime, and on a less brutal but still important metric the 19 per cent of children who are persistently absent from school or the 1-in-5 who have a probable mental health condition, and you will find a mountain of safeguarding reports and policies that bounce criminal activity and neglect away from the police and courts and on to ineffective safeguarding officers.
It has been illegal for anyone to neglect, assault or harm both physically and psychologically, a child since 1933
Two examples from last week at work: a 16-year-old girl who has been thrown out of her home and lives with extended family was drunk and disorderly on the streets, kicking in a door and verbally abusing passersby. Police were called and the scene defused. She was not arrested but muggins here, her support worker, had to fill in a safeguarding form recording the incident. Consequences, sanctions, there were none. The following day, I saw another 17-year-old boy, who was arrested 12 months ago for waving a black BB gun around a city centre; he learned that his case will go to court “at some point”. He was taken into care for a period of six weeks to give his parents a break and has behaved like a complete nuisance ever since. I’ve just completed a lengthy risk-assessment about the safety of taking him to a library. I’m sure some of this safeguarding paraphernalia would have been unnecessary if he had received swift justice for his criminal behaviour 12 months ago.
In 1989, the Children’s Act made it the duty of local authorities to “safeguard and promote” the welfare of children who are in need. From this point onwards a vast safeguarding and risk assessment industry has swamped children’s services and given the misleading impression that children are “safe” simply because a bureaucratic paper trail has been created to evidence such safeguarding. And within this safeguarding scaffolding, evidence of criminal or neglectful activity by parents or children, is treated (or simply logged) by an army of support workers, social workers, youth mentors, counsellors, multi-agency panels, rather than by the police and courts.
When I first started working as a support worker, I was uneasy with how “safeguarding” often seemed to serve as a euphemism for avoiding proper accountability for criminal behaviour. In the first week of work, I visited the home of a child who had been out of school for two years. After my first visit I told our agency’s safeguarding officer that the police need to be contacted because the mother was over-feeding the son who had already reached 22 stone at the age of 15. The child was maggot white and the house smelled of urine — it was a clear case of child neglect (to me at least). The safe-guarding officer told me that, “all the relevant authorities’ were aware of the family and their complex needs. I should log my observations on the agency’s safeguarding platform and in future when conducting a risk assessment observe whether there are any obvious hazards that would be an immediate risk to the child or staff. Now, I live in fear of not filling in safeguarding forms properly. I have been reprimanded for not recording that one of my 14-year-old-charges vapes: “What’s the point?” I wanted to reply: “Nothing will be done about it beyond this form.”
The inverted danger of this safeguarding culture can be better understood if we picture Fagin’s Den in Oliver Twist. Imagine then a safeguarding officer conducting a risk assessment for the protection of the vulnerable children housed within: various forms would be filled in to state there were no visible sharp objects, information signposted about CAHMS, safeguarding concerns about Oliver’s inability to regulate his emotions would be recorded on MyConcern, the education safeguarding platform. Of comment on the wider criminality of the den, there would be none, beyond a logging on the safeguarding system and possible escalation to the relevant social worker authorities.
Similarly, vulnerable children who come into contact with the state today are devoured in a blizzard of safeguarding reports. DBS-checked risk assessment and safeguarding officers from numerous child support agencies and charities faff around allocating a numbering system to advise on the safety of a dog walk with a vulnerable child for example, yet ignore the whole rotten or criminal edifice of living conditions in which they exist. Just ask the tens of thousands of vulnerable girls — many from within the social care system — who were raped by Pakistani rape gangs.
Having logged concerns on the relevant documents, support workers of various stripes enter an illusion that somewhere along the paper trail, someone will do something. The emphasis lands on getting the paperwork right, rather than bravely standing up and yelling at the top of your voice: something is very wrong here — call the police. Some in government call this the Grenfell Tower Effect: nothing is wrong because the paperwork is done properly. It’s easier to evidence care by following safeguarding procedure than to make any realistic effort to address the fact that for example, the child lives with an obviously neglectful or incompetent parent, is part of a known criminal household or is openly a member of a gang/online jihadi network and engaging in criminal activity. Even if action is taken and a child “taken into care,” parents are rarely punished for neglect and so the whole sorry saga continues. It is the ultimate state of what Nicholas Bagley coined “The Procedure Fetish” whereby child welfare agencies become process-obsessed rather than outcomes-orientated.
And let’s be honest, the court system is creaking: there’s a backlog of over 74,000 cases in the Crown Court system and over 300,000 in the Magistrates Courts. It’s preposterous to think there is any more legal capacity to actually punish widespread criminal behaviour on the part of “vulnerable” children or neglectful parents. “Safeguarding” therefore becomes a bureaucratic plan B.
Axel Radakubana is a case in point. As a “vulnerable child” who was referred to Prevent, was under the “care” of Alder Hey Children’s NHS foundation, and attended a special educational needs school to boot he would have been swathed in safeguarding reports, policies and initiatives. Arrests and imprisonments for taking a knife 10 times into school and being violent at school — not so much. This preference for safeguarding over police intervention has been encouraged thanks to the unpalatability of police and state involvement in family life: the Cathy Come Home emotional reflex of the left and the state-free sanctity of the home, from the right.
In the words of one foster mother I work with: “It seems to have been decided by the powers that be, to leave a whole segment of society alone in their crime, their corrupt ideologies, their squalor, or their generational inability to parent, while treating those of us who are trying to help as potential criminals who must be restrained by safeguarding courses and risk assessments.”
It has been illegal for anyone to neglect, assault or harm both physically and psychologically, a child since 1933. What use is safeguarding protocol when it is already illegal to have sex with children, traffic people, sell drugs and carry knives into school? All such neglectful and criminal activity must be shouted about loudly by all who come across it — not just logged on a form — and then swiftly stopped by the police and punished by the courts, safeguarding procedure, or no safeguarding procedure.
