This ought to be a tragedy, but we are turning it into a soap opera. Tragedy, in the hands of the Greek ancients who invented the form, was more than a way of telling a story. It was a mechanism through which viewers could learn lessons about competing and sometimes chaotic social forces. Goodness knows there is plenty of scope for that in the death of the child we have come to call Baby P, the toddler who died in August 2007 with more than 50 injuries, despite being on a social services \u201cat-risk\u201d register and having been visited 60 times in eight months by a phalanx of social workers, doctors and police.<\/p>\n
Yet from all that we are offering ourselves only a savage soap which parades the failings of two women to reinforce society\u2019s sense of safe moral superiority which is the key purpose of scapegoating. The tragic death of little Peter Connelly is becoming in public just another Sharon and Tracey story.<\/p>\n
The hapless baby\u2019s mother, Tracey Connelly, has reportedly been recently released from prison having barely served five years for the child\u2019s killing.\u00a0 Sharon Shoesmith, the head of children’s services at Haringey Council at the time of Peter’s death, we learned this week, is to be given a payout as high as \u00a3600,000 for unfair dismissal after the case.<\/p>\n
This is becoming a saga of competing icons. On the one hand we are repeatedly shown a photograph of the blond-haired trusting toddler. On the other the police mugshot of his mother embodies the thick-lipped sullen self-absorption of our age while photos of the ex-social work chief, snatched outside court, speak of a persecuted self-righteousness. They are only images. Reality is more complex.<\/p>\n
But many responses are not. A relative of the dead child\u2019s father, who was estranged from his mother at the time of the killing, told one newspaper: \u201cShe should have served much longer. This is not justice.\u201d\u00a0 And yet the same cry lies at the heart of Ms Shoesmith\u2019s lawyer\u2019s insistence that her dismissal, in the full flood of public outrage after little Peter\u2019s death, was \u201ca flagrant breach of natural justice\u201d in which Haringey Council decided not to follow proper procedures to satisfy tabloid bloodlust.<\/p>\n
Where lies justice? We have systems to adjudge that but they are fallible. Connelly has been released by the Parole Board, which has a duty to balance the rehabilitation of prisoners against the continuing danger they represent to the public. It will undoubtedly have placed restrictions to ban Connelly from returning to Haringey, or contacting her remaining four children, and insisting she remains under probation supervision. She can be taken back to prison if she breaches her parole terms.<\/p>\n
Parole Board members \u2013judges, psychiatrists, psychologists, probation officers and independents \u2013 have decided she is no longer a danger.\u00a0 Overwhelmingly they are better qualified to do that than are red-top editors. But with high-profile cases there are wider considerations than the progress an individual has made in prison. Some crimes, like this one, carry an extra symbolic freight and it is wise to ask whether the burden of that has been discharged.<\/p>\n
It is easy to mock the demotic response of Daily Mail<\/i> readers who appended website comments to the story such as \u201cshe helped torcher and kill an innocent child and she gets a poxy 6 yrs\u201d or \u201cthat is a disgrace she allowed out \u2026 faulted system as usual\u201d. But they have a point.\u00a0 There was something singularly shocking about the callous cowardly cunning of Connelly with her lies to doctors, clear attempts to manipulate the jury at her trial and her deliberately smearing chocolate over her child\u2019s bruises to deceive social workers. The dissonance between that, and what the professionals now say, underscores a legitimate concern, which goes beyond the issue of public confidence in justice.\u00a0 It is about what is the best way to prevent injustice to children in the first place.<\/p>\n
Likewise, though the Supreme Court has ruled that proper procedures were flouted in dismissing Ms Shoesmith, there are wider issues of concern, which the law does not address. Of course Ms Shoesmith should have been given a proper chance to put her case before her dismissal. But procedural unfairness does not take away from the fact that she headed a department which Ofsted, the healthcare commission and the police inspectorate all found was responsible for \u201ca catalogue of failures\u201d that left a small boy to die in horrific circumstances. Society needs mechanisms to address that and Ms Shoesmith needed the decency to understand that she should have resigned before she was sacked.<\/p>\n
Instead we are left with a system in which everyone presents themselves as a victim and declines to accept\u00a0 responsibility for their actions, or lack of them. This newspaper\u2019s revelation today that there are yet more cases in the pipeline in Haringey is shocking but unsurprising.\u00a0 A terrible litany of dead children\u2019s names \u2013 Maria Colwell, Jasmine Beckford, Victoria Climbi\u00e9, Peter Connelly, Daniel Pelka, Hamzah Khan \u2013 testifies to inadequacy of British systems of child care. After each, a Serious Case Review pointed to the same thing: social workers, police, teachers and doctors who do not communicate effectively. Haringey has had six such reviews since the death of Baby P. Yet the lessons seem never to be properly implemented.<\/p>\n
One academic has counted 24 public inquiries into child abuse in the 1970s, 25 in the 1980s and 22 in the 1990s. Hundreds of Serious Case Reviews have been compiled over the last decade.\u00a0 In the two years to 2011, such reviews made an average of 46 recommendations with 40 page action plans. When the answers are so ineffective that suggests we are asking the wrong questions. The problem is that they are hard questions about complex issues like preventive community social work versus<\/i> crisis intervention.<\/p>\n
So we ignore them, and instead report the latest on Sharon or Tracey \u2013 who has told a friend that now she is out of prison she is not planning a new relationship but is \u201cjust going to shag about for a bit and have loads of fun\u201d. How we all sneer. Soap operas are more fun. But in the end they are a cop out.<\/p>\n
The Independent on Sunday<\/i><\/p>\n
Paul Vallely is Visiting Professor of Public Ethics at the University of Chester<\/i><\/p>\n
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