GRAHAM ALLEN MP

A comment/opinion piece in today’s The Times gave full backing to Graham’s work on Early Intervention which you can see below

“Spot baby abusers early - when they're toddlers” - By David Aaronovitch

18 November 2008 - The Times - Page 24

After all the outrage and the prejudice about Baby P, the rational approach is to intervene early in dysfunctional families

Readers of The Washington Post learnt about the case of Baby P under the headline "Britain in shock over abuse death of toddler". And so we have been, shocked clean out of our wits. Or, as the admirable Martha Kearney put it, in a preface to a radio interview with the Tottenham MP David Lammy yesterday: "Feelings throughout the nation are running high, and people are shocked because there have been no resignations."

She was right. Large numbers of us, in the face of this shock, have mutated into mere gobs on legs, iterating and reiterating the last plausible prejudice that sat on us. A terrible thing has happened, it's all down to X (fill in the prejudice) and someone's head should bump bloodily down the steps of the Temple of the Sun, to save us from the wrath of the gods.

  David Aarontovich

Some have tried to remain judicious. I was struck by how, at the very moment when the BBC news operation was trumpeting the "revelations" on the Baby P case, to be broadcast in last night's Panorama, that show's own producer was talking about the very difficult decision that the child protection agencies in Haringey had had to make. The leaks (pretty clearly from the police) revealed disagreements about the best course of action to be taken in the summer of 2007, and a subsequent police view that social workers were over optimistic about the mother's capacity to cope and insufficiently focused on the child, despite the signs of injury.

The fact that the wrong decision was made has permitted just about anything to be said about those who made it. Sharon Shoesmith, the borough's director of children and young people's services, has been subjected to what can only be described as a media lynching. A photograph of her at Ascot in 2007 was put on the front page of the London Evening Standard, with the clear implication that Ms Shoesmith was some kind of Nero figure, callously enjoying the fleshpots while children died around her.

Little wonder that, as we reported at the weekend, some Haringovians then turned up outside her offices to call for her dismissal. Yesterday The Sun even penetrated sufficiently far into Ms Shoesmith's soul as to suggest that she might not have read the accounts of Baby P's death, "such has been her shocking detachment from this case". Bloody woman didn't emote properly; there's your problem.

Somehow 60 head teachers from the borough, either lacking the detachment of The Sun from the situation, or else its keen sense of other people's responsibility, managed to call for Ms Shoesmith to stay in position. This is pretty remarkable, in my experience. It might genuinely be called a groundswell of support, and should give one pause.

One by one the prejudices (some of them more sophisticated than others) were trotted out. Social workers not paid enough (wrong), too much form-filling (irrelevant to this case), right down to my own prejudice that social workers wrongly try to keep children with parents who are incapable of washing a lavatory, let alone bringing up a human being. The problem with my prejudice is not just that the removal option was fully discussed, but also that outcomes for children in care are pretty appalling.

In this context, while mistakes will have been made and Lord Laming may find yet more ways in which communication could be improved, there is nothing to vindicate the politician's inevitable promise of "it cannot be allowed to happen again". This is an impossible pledge, not least in a month where two other children were allegedly stabbed to death by their mother in Manchester (though this, for some reason, did not shock Britain).

To some it is all evidence, once again, of the "broken society", the nexus of drink, drugs, one-parent families, political correctness and permissiveness that has supposedly turned our streets into wolf runs for feral children. One writer laid the blame squarely at the door of step-parenting. Actually the child homicide rate has been fairly static since the 1970s, with natural parents the main suspects in 44 per cent of all cases in 2005-06 (roughly split between mothers and fathers), strangers in 22 per cent of cases, and only 24 per cent of cases the victims of other family members, friends or acquaintances (with a further 10 per cent falling outside these categories).

Nor is the concern (or even the timbre of that concern) so markedly different from the past, when the most "dysfunctional" of families gave rise to Hogarth's Gin Lane, or to the belief of the contraceptive pioneer Marie Stopes in the use of eugenics to breed viciousness out of the lumpenproletariat.

If that sounds complacent, as in "the baby-killers are always with us" it isn't meant to be. In mid-September the Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith and the Nottingham Labour MP Graham Allen published a document making the case for a system of early intervention to help families. I read it yesterday, and recommend it to you if you want to go on thinking beyond the "outrage" of the Baby P case.

Their first proposition is summed up in the words of a Professor David Farrington, that "antisocial children grow up to become antisocial adults who go on to raise antisocial children". They noted 2003 Home Office estimates that 350,000 children had drug-addicted parents and a million had alcohol addicted parents. They then detailed the "Dunedin study", begun in New Zealand in 1972, where nurses observed three-year-olds at play and identified - from behaviour alone - those that might be at risk. Eighteen years later the outcomes were studied. The at-risk boys were 21/2 times more likely to have committed an offence and five times as likely to be abusing their partners. Thirty per cent of the at-risk girls had become teenage mothers, compared with none of those not at risk. Forty-three per cent of the at-risk girls were in violent or abusive relationships.

When Tony Blair spoke of early intervention a few years ago he was derided for seeming to suggest "foetal ASBOs". There are plenty of Britons who feel that state or agency intervention into the lives of citizens has gone far enough already. But Duncan Smith and Allen not only commend some of the things the Government has done already (such as Sure Start and nurse family partnership pilot schemes) but argue for much more including, controversially, enhanced "data tracking" of at-risk individuals. The two men want support and education to be offered prenatally, special primary school programmes focusing on parenting support and children's social competencies, and pre-parenting workshops in secondary schools. The whole thing is aimed at breaking the cycle of chaotic parenting.

This is costly, and I hesitate to fling this bucket back into the well, but since there's such a lot of easily dissipated outrage, here it goes. Feelings can run as high as they like, but if we really care about Baby P or the other Baby Ps who survive to go on to be the next generation of Baby P abusers, then let's put our brains and our money where, at the moment, our great big gobs are.