A thoughtless moment or a serious breach of care?

JILL ADAM was safely home in Harrogate with her two children yesterday, but she did not want to talk to the press. What parent could blame her? For haven't most of us, if we are honest, done something as thoughtless as she did? It's just that the rest of us haven't been charged with "felony child abuse" and hauled off to spend the night in a Florida jail.

Mrs Adam and her husband Philip were on holiday in the up-market Tradewinds resort hotel at St Petersburg, Florida, by the Gulf of Mexico, with her parents. To celebrate Mr Adam's 35th birthday the adults had gone down to the pool area to watch a firework display, leaving Maisie, five, and Daniel, one, asleep in the second-floor room around 100 feet away from the water's edge.

When they returned, 45 minutes later, there was a police officer present with Maisie. She had woken up, it transpired, and left the room to look for her parents - only to have the door click shut behind her. She had wandered the corridor crying until a hotel security guard found her and called the police, who arrested the British couple and carted them off to the Pinellas County Jail, where they were kept overnight. To add spice to the drama the cops refused to bow to the protests of Mrs Adam's father, Sir Lawrence Byford, who was, from 1983 to 1987, HM Chief Inspector of constabulary.

A row ensued. The couple's lawyer, John Trevena, complained it was a "tremendous over-reaction from St Petersburg Beach Police". But at the police department, Captain Joe Cornish denied this. "The officers acted appropriately," he said. "If the child had fallen off the balcony and died, nobody would be saying the parents had just made a lapse in judgement."

Would things have been any different had the incident occurred in a British hotel? Dr Eileen Munro, a senior lecturer in social policy at the London School of Economics, who specialises in child protection, hopes so. "The parental care was less than perfect but it is not fair to put it on a par with malicious abuse or persistent neglect," she said. "Parents know their children better than anyone else and are the best judges of whether a child will sleep through in a strange place. The added factor they obviously overlooked was that the noise of the fireworks might wake the child. They did not think the situation through properly."

But British law is not exact in such circumstances. It speaks in terms like "reasonable care" and "significant harm". There is not even any legal basis for the popular notion that children can be left with a babysitter who is over the age of 14, according to Leigh Daynes of the Save the Children Fund. "The court will decide whether the person they were left with was capable. The essence of its considerations would be whether children were being put at risk. At the most extreme, parents could be prosecuted for desertion. The law has to take into account the worst-case scenario but its implementation has to be done with common sense."

But the main concern is the welfare of the child. Whether any of the authorities here would have thought that young Maisie's welfare was best served by carting her mother and father off to jail for the night is unlikely. The idea that such action would deter other parents does not wash with Dr Munro. "It is not, generally speaking, a good idea to frighten parents with Draconian measures," she said. "These are more likely to scare parents off in situations where they ought to be approaching the authorities for help. The St Petersburg message is a destructive one."

In London, the Department of Health recently advised local authority social workers to change their child protection policies. Emphasis will shift from holding big inquiries in to relatively minor non-accidental injuries. Instead there will be quicker judgements but more time will be spent looking at the situations of low income and other stresses which are the background to the child abuse. The plan is to deal with causes rather than symptoms and give more support to problem families.

"There are some evil parents," said Dr Munro, "but most are thoughtless or under pressure. In a case like that of the Adam family a talk with a social worker would - so long as they regretted their actions - show that there was no serious future threat to the children." The talk would focus on possible alternatives - getting a hotel babysitter or programming the phone to act as a monitor - to obviate the risk of the child ending up in a dangerous position.

There would be nothing that with hindsight Jill Adam wouldn't have thought of herself. For fulminate against American over-reaction as she might, Mrs Adam will know of the agony of two parents at the other end of the Leeds-Liverpool canal where the family of Shaun Smith was yesterday searching desperately for the seven-year-old who was reported to have fallen in the water on Saturday. It will only make the nagging irritation with her own thoughtlessness even more insistent.