Life for Child AU, the toddler at the centre of the UK’s latest child protection scandal, was almost unbearably bleak: she was unloved, isolated, underfed, understimulated, ignored and left shivering in her cot for hours wearing filthy nappies.
“It can be surmised that Child AU learned that there was little if any point in crying,” the Northamptonshire safeguarding practice review noted grimly. “Health professionals noted that she presented as sad, watchful and frozen.”
Her mother would refuse to pick her up, or cuddle her, and was witnessed asking the father not to talk to his daughter. There was no social interaction with other children. Her family’s pet dog had toys, the review said, but there was no sign of any for Child AU.
When she was eventually taken into care, after hospital X-rays identified a broken arm and five previous fractures to her legs, the evidently traumatised girl would not smile or talk or cry. Her foster mother noted she had “learned to shed silent tears”.
Much of this awful story was documented by health visitors, and later by social workers. A central question posed by the case is why these months of witnessed neglect never led to an escalation in protection for Child AU. Why was she allowed to stay at home?
The review is clear on the shortcomings of the professionals involved: poor judgment; lack of professional curiosity when faced with hostile parents; lack of awareness of the risk of harm and the dangers of neglect. All this seems eminently justified criticism.
The report, however, does not cover the wider context in which all this happened. Why, for example, did three different social workers pass through Child AU’s life in as many months?
The health visitors told review investigators they did not press for child protection intervention because they assumed from past experience the request would be knocked back; the threshold for social care intervention, they implied, was set far too high.
Because the Child AU case happened in 2018-19 we know staffing, management and chronic finance issues did indeed form the broad backdrop. Northamptonshire Children’s Services (since replaced by a children’s trust) was, as Ofsted reported at the time, overspent, overwhelmed, and in utter chaos.
The Child AU review is rightly rigorous in highlighting poor frontline practice. But it does not include what other reviews have called the “bigger systems context” of cuts and council defunding. Of course, safeguarding professionals should learn lessons from these reports – but so should policymakers and politicians.
This article was amended on 10 May 2022. An earlier version said the report was “strangely incurious” about a number of aspects of the case, but some of these aspects were included in the report, and others were beyond the remit of the report. The relevant references have therefore been removed.