THE CATHOLIC Church has been rightly criticised for its shocking failure to protect children or to follow child protection rules. But the State, too, has much to answer for in relation to the standard of care it is providing to children at risk.
As Carl O’Brien reports in today’s editions, a cursory examination of social work files reveals alarming gaps in services and a failure to respond to urgent reports of abuse or neglect. Hundreds of serious child protection reports are not being properly assessed or followed up. The result is that vulnerable young people remain at serious risk of abuse or mistreatment. Social work staff in many parts of the State say they are being forced to ignore these cases or simply to add them to waiting lists due to heavy workloads and under-staffing.
Many of these concerns have been raised before. However what stands out now is the previously undisclosed detail of the kinds of cases that are not receiving an appropriate response. They make for highly disturbing reading.
They include a young teenager who has not been to school for two years because her mother is neglectful and unable to cope; a young boy who has been admitted to hospital on numerous occasions with head injuries amid concerns that his mother is physically abusing him; a boy with serious mental health problems whose mother is refusing to attend appointments with specialists to get him help; and a 10-year-old child who is self-harming and expressing suicidal thoughts.
These cases and more like them demonstrate that a child protection system supposedly designed to protect the most vulnerable children is not responding in many cases to the needs of those at serious risk of abuse or neglect until it is too late.
This is not acceptable. If the church has a profound duty of care to young people, then the State’s responsibility is even greater. Under childcare legislation, social services have a legal duty to protect the care and welfare of vulnerable young people. The State is also, in effect, the parent of more than 6,000 children in the care system.
To their credit, both the Government and the Health Service Executive have been focusing on ways of improving services. There are plans to make the rules to protect children obligatory, instead of voluntary, and to establish a new child and family support agency.
But new laws and new nameplates will not be enough. What is more urgent is the requirement to change the culture of health and social services and to ensure that gaps of the kind that have existed until now are no longer tolerated. Social workers, too, may need to embrace new ways of working to help realise this vision.
As a society, we have learned in recent years of the appalling cost paid by young people when obstacles are placed in the way of their welfare. Yet a considerable distance remains to be travelled before those who are most vulnerable can be assured of access to high quality and professional services when they need them. The gaps involved must be closed.