No stone left unturned

December 7th, 2009

Another report into child protection services in Scotland, another depressing read.

Research by the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration was the latest damning evidence of the failure to protect our most vulnerable children.

I was able to put this shocking litany of failures to the Scottish Government this week.

The numbers would shock you to the core – more than 47,000 youngsters referred to the Children’s Reporter in the last year, that’s five per cent of the child population.

The one piece of good news – if you can describe it as that – was it had fallen from the record high two years ago.

But the most damning revelation was that 144 children died in the last six years AFTER they had been referred to the reporter.

Tragically, 30 of those children didn’t even reach their second birthday.

The background factors would be no surprise to anyone – parental substance misuse, domestic violence and drug withdrawal symptoms at birth.

And it gets worse - the report admits that the number of children who died while under referral was probably more.

The Children’s Reporter received notification from some agencies but not all agencies – so even in death their circumstances were never properly acknowledged.

The Cabinet Secretary in charge of child protection, Mike Russell, certainly has a challenge on his hands trying to deal with these unacceptable child death rates.

I challenged him to take on this issue as a matter of urgency and bring about an inquiry to ensure all the lessons are learned and services are there for the future.

If we are to reduce this tragic death toll we need to understand how these children lived and the circumstances of their death.

No stone should be left unturned.