Jeremy Laurance: Social workers alone cannot stop child abuse

One of the many astonishing features of the Victoria Climbié case is that a bullied, brutalised and horrifically injured child was never placed on the at-risk register as a suspected case of abuse. Despite the involvement of dozens of housing workers, social workers, doctors, health visitors and police in her care, she was never thought to be in need of protection. Instead, from the family's first contact with Ealing Council's homeless persons unit in April 1999 to her final admission to St Mary's Hospital, Paddington in February 2000, where she died, she was identified only as a "child in need".

The failure on the part of the professionals to act on suspicions of abuse lies at the heart of this catastrophe. Lord Laming admits he was "amazed" by it. Had she been placed on the at-risk register, the apparatus of the child protection system would have swung into action, and there is every likelihood that Victoria would still be alive today. In this, her case mirrors that of more than a score of similar tragedies over the last half century. Of 70 child abuse scandals since 1945 that have triggered inquiries, only a handful of the children involved were in the child protection system.

Once in that system, the evidence is that it works reasonably well to protect children. Somehow Victoria became another victim who fell through the gaps in a system that should capture all vulnerable children and protect them from harm. In this, she was a casualty of the spurious distinction that has grown up in the decade since the passage of the Children's Act, 1992, between supporting children and protecting them.

That Act required social services departments to devote their efforts to supporting all children in need. Shortage of resources has put enormous pressure on them, and consequently they have hived off child protection as a separate function. But protecting children is part and parcel of supporting them and their families – it cannot be hived off. As a result of this false dichotomy, social services have increasingly adopted a gatekeeping role, controlling admission to the at-risk register and assuming responsibility for child protection.

The effect has been that other agencies – health, housing, education – have seen child abuse as a social work responsibility, aggravating problems of communication. Children have been categorised as either at risk or not – but life is not as simple as that. The whole of the public services should have a responsibility to care for children.

Lord Laming's answer is to bring child support and protection together under single organisations at local level, and a national one as well, with clear lines of accountability from bottom to top. Whether the apparatus he recommends of a ministerial board, a children's commissioner plus national and local committees is the best way of achieving this end deserves careful analysis, but it may well be overly elaborate.

The objective however is surely right – to simplify and clarify the duty of care that lies on all the professionals involved in child support and protection. As Lord Laming says, the principal failure was "widespread organisational malaise" and the lack of accountability throughout the system.

The Government, anticipating this conclusion, announced last year its intention to create children's trusts that would be responsible for all children's needs and would bring together health, social services, education, voluntary agencies and, possibly, police at a local level. Yesterday, Alan Milburn, the Secretary of State for Health, invited bids to pilot the first such trusts.

The other critical factor identified by Lord Laming also echoed down the years of child-abuse tragedies: the failure of communication among the professionals involved and the inability to keep track of vulnerable children. In a case like Victoria Climbié's (whose name was changed), without some unique identifier such as an NHS number, it is easy to lose a child.

One of the most depressing features identified by the inquiry was the reluctance of key players to accept responsibility for what went wrong: "Time and again it was dispiriting to listen to the buck passing from those who attempted to justify their positions... The most lasting tribute to Victoria Climbié would be an improvement in the quality of management and leadership." Individuals who have tried to shirk responsibilities deserve blame. But there is a wider issue of low morale in social work, one of the most reviled and underpaid professions.

Faced with a tragedy such as Victoria Climbié's, the public demands tougher action from social workers to deal with dysfunctional families, to protect children. But simultaneously there is widespread resentment at outsiders who interfere in the domestic setting, and social workers are excoriated for splitting up families. One danger of the Climbié case is that the proper public horror it has created will cause the pendulum to swing, as it did after the Maria Colwell case in 1973, towards excessive intervention in the lives of ordinary families just managing to cope.

We need a reformed and improved child support and protection system that will minimise the risks – but in this immensely sensitive area of human relations, eliminating all risk is impossible.

j.laurance@independent.co.uk