Natasha Walter: Our lazy tolerance of child abuse

The ghosts of two little girls, Lauren Wright and Anna Climbie, have been haunting our airwaves. Those two fragile child faces, with their innocent eyes and gentle smiles, appear repeatedly before our eyes. We hear tales that we can hardly bear to listen to, of one little girl who was forced to eat sandwiches filled with worms and to stand in front of a fire, of another little girl who spent months in a bathtub, tied up in a bin liner, of two children whose bodies, at death, were emaciated and covered in bruises.

We also hear how the suffering of these children, one in urban London, one in rural Norfolk, was ignored by social workers and doctors and teachers – and also by ordinary people who saw their bruised faces and even the actions of their violent guardians, and did nothing.

The news agenda is currently dominated by other issues of greater international scope. But at any other time the horrific details of Lauren's stepmother's behaviour, coming the week after the opening of the inquiry into Anna Climbie's death, might have sparked a renewed debate on violence within families. That is urgently needed. As we should all know by now, violence in the family is much more of a threat to children in this country than the far more discussed issue of stranger danger. Of the 80 or so children murdered each year, almost all will be killed within their families.

It is understandably harder for newspapers to whip up support for a campaign against family violence than it is to whip up support against strangers. Because the idea of the stranger lurking in the bushes makes each of us feel nervous about our own children, whereas violence within the family is confined to another household – it's about them, not about us.

But surely it degrades all of us to be living in a society where a little girl is beaten and starved for years, and nobody has the will to do anything about it until her battered, skeletal body turns up in the hospital morgue. We talk about the dangers of living in a nanny state, but this isn't a nanny state. For Lauren and Anna, it was an ogre state.

And it's too easy to talk simply about the failures of individual social workers. We can't expect a few public officers to put to right the problems of a society where Lauren Wright was punched in the head in the street and neighbours did nothing; where she was whacked in the face in the park, hard enough to cause a bruise, and friends did nothing; where she lapsed into catatonic depression and family members did nothing.

Yes, it is important that social workers should be better trained and managed. It is also important that organisations such as Childline and the NSPCC should be fully funded for services that help to make up for the shortfalls in what is provided by the public sector.

But at the same time we need a revolution in public attitudes to violence towards children. I know that if I start to put ordinary, everyday low-level violence against children in the same article as the names of Lauren Wright and Anna Climbie I am risking a deluge of outraged mail from parents who believe that minor violence is perfectly acceptable against children – that it is, in fact, a sign of love.

And before you write to me, let me say that no, I don't believe that you are capable of killing your children. I do believe that you love them. I just don't think that a society in which we take for granted the idea that children will regularly be hurt by adults is one in which children are ever going to be safe.

Legislation against parents hitting their children is much opposed in this country, by liberals of both right and left. They believe that it interferes too much in the freedom of family members to do as they see fit to one another. They question whether it could ever be truly workable.

They have the support of leading politicians, who have admitted to hitting their own children – Tony Blair's children have felt the blow of the Prime Minister's hand, though he has spoken of that with regret, and David Blunkett's children have felt the blow of the Home Secretary's hand, and he has spoken of that with satisfaction.

Interestingly, though, it appears that Tony Blair's spouse sees the issue rather differently. In this newspaper yesterday, Cherie Booth spoke of a meeting where the spouses of the leaders of the European Union got together with Save the Children to talk about violence against children. She was struck by the fact that the Dutch and Scandinavians were simply horrified at the very thought of smacking children, because in their societies it had become completely accepted that violence against children was wrong.

A law against smacking won't suddenly produce a society in which children are never hurt, but it might help to break down our lazy tolerance of such violence. Rather than simply repeating the unthinking criticism that such a ban would be unworkable or would be used to punish trivial lapses, we could learn from other countries. Scotland is planning to institute a partial ban – on hitting children under three or using an implement to hit a child of any age. And 10 European countries already outlaw smacking, and have found that the legislation has taken public opinion with it. Their citizens have become less tolerant of violence against children over the years.

So, presumably, in those countries it would not be so easy for a woman to scream at her stepchild in the street, and to punch her in the head "with incredible force". Lauren, then aged five, was knocked to the ground. Her stepmother walked off with her own children. A few moments later Lauren picked herself up, silent tears streaming down her face, and carried on walking behind her family.

How can we reconstruct this scene? Because a neighbour of the Wrights saw it happen, and did not pick up the telephone. Presumably he felt unsure that what he had witnessed really was a crime – after all, in a society where thwacking and slapping go on all the time against children, who ever wants to interfere? Unbelievably, 47 people were called as witnesses for the prosecution in the case of Lauren Wright – and of those only three had reported the incidents they had witnessed. This was not some anonymous urban environment, but a close-knit village community, and yet even here a child could be beaten in public and hardly a soul would lift a finger.

Of course we already have legislation that outlaws the kind of abuse that Lauren Wright or Anna Climbie were found to have suffered for years before they died. But neighbours and friends do not see the full spectrum of abuse. They see a stealthy punch, a sudden whack, a few bruises. Wouldn't it be the case that, if they could be sure that such behaviour was unacceptable in law, they would be more likely to report it?

As the NSPCC informs anyone who is listening, the numbers of children killed each year in their families has not dropped for all the 30 years they have been monitoring the situation. Isn't it time we raised a hand against the abusers, rather than against the children?

n.walter@btinternet.com