An eighteen-month-old boy was playing under the table while his parents chatted about a book called Little Black Sambo. Sambo was nearly devoured by wild animals when he left home without permission because he wanted to show off his birthday presents. His parents found him, shivering and naked, and forgave him for his disobedience. A colour illustration pictured the party they had to celebrate.
The little boy began to scream under the table. "But it all ends happily," his mother said. He screamed louder. He had read the end of the story in the colour illustration. He knew better. The back of the dustjacket showed Sambo, crying and alone.
Dr Maria Montessori tells this parable in The Secret of Childhood, a radical, visionary assertion of what children and childhood could be. When she wrote it some 90 years ago, innovators in healthcare, medicine and the emerging social sciences were convinced that the 20th century would be "The Century of the Child." Italy's King Victor Emmanuel III made it a key theme of his coronation speech. Even the 1916 Proclamation asserted children's rights as equal to adults'.
So is it appropriate to sound a great hurrah now because Ireland is finally introducing child protection guidelines just in time to beat the December 31st deadline?
Frank Fahey's guidelines take the attitude that self-regulation by adults will produce at best happy children, and at least children who are abused less frequently than before. Overall, they represent benchmarks in child protection policy, not because they are radical but simply because they are there.
These are the codes of practice we needed 30 years ago when the Health Act, 1970, set up eight health boards; a very different time, of course, when abuse was hardly spoken of, and children's visibility in the public sphere was nil.
With the guidelines encouraging everyone to report suspected abuse, cases like the infamous Kilkenny and Mayo ones are far less likely to recur. Depending on how we all respond to the White Paper on mandatory reporting, due before Santa comes in three months' time, the Minister will introduce legislation to make them stick. But when we legislate for children or, as so far, produce consensual guidelines to support their welfare, what and whose end do we have in mind?
THE SINGLE radical idea in the Minister's comments may have been a slip of the tongue, or a moment of rhetoric designed to enthuse us. Immediately before making his statement he quashed plans for a system of supervising the supervisors, overruled his own working party's recommendation that health boards be accountable to regional child protection committees, and fobbed us off by again floating the idea of a children's ombudsman.
What he said, however, implied a revolution in the way the State understands its role with children. "This simple message [that anyone who suspects abuse should report it] is based on the view that everyone has a duty to protect children and it is not just the job of social workers and other health professionals."
The public outcry generated by the discovery of so many cases of abuse has spurred the Government into some positive action, such as the forthcoming commission chaired by Ms Justice Laffoy. If politicians ever doubted public support, they cannot but know that they have a mandate to make childcare and child protection a top priority now. But despite all the hullabaloo about the guidelines, changes are dangerously cosmetic.
These initiatives are being grafted on to a system which was never designed to cope with their likes, and which consistently failed to do so until such cases as that of Brendan Smyth broke through their institutionalised nets. The reasons for this have not been explored in structural terms because institutional power still comes first. Leading agencies such as the Departments of Health, Justice and Social Welfare and the health boards are not willing to face the prospect of internal change, or any disruption of the increasingly cosy-looking relationship between themselves.
The best example of this recalcitrance is the health boards, which have collectively refused to countenance any chance of being accountable to an outside agency other than the Department of Health. On the evidence of Frank Fahey's indecent haste to agree with them, we can take it that the central departments share that view.
This position ignores abundant evidence from the US, Canada and the UK that external audits are imperative in a fair, transparent childcare system. Are we expected to believe that Irish agencies will prove the exception to the general rule?
Mr Fahey teased us with the prospect of an Ombudsman for Children. It is certainly an attractive title. But why would an Ombudsman for Children settle matters any better? Kevin Murphy, the Ombudsman, has consistently reported how inadequate legislative and administrative arrangements make it impossible for his office to operate as he believes it should.
Children's policies are being forced to conform to adult time, which puts their interests last. Actions that need not have waited for ministerial support have not been taken. No strategy to address the lack of trained staff has been devised; the register announced by Mr Fahey is merely a new version of what social workers have operated for a number of years, and have worked flat out to do so. Children at risk may be identified better and sooner as a result of the guidelines, but there are already real difficulties in finding places where they may be cared for well.
In the Dublin area, some 1,500 children a year need short or longer-term placements, preferably in caring family homes where they can be given love and special understanding. Lateral suggestions to include foster parents as a salaried, outreach community related to the child protection team are being discussed, but a shortage of social workers to assess and train potential foster parents, never mind a shortage of foster parents nationally, means that the processing of such care places is happening too slowly for the increasing numbers of children who need them.
Instead of serving themselves, the institutions with fragmented responsibility for childcare might consider putting children first. Children are not adults-in-waiting. They cannot wait. The point of Dr Montessori's retelling of the Sambo obedience parable was not to make children conform to adult rules, but to excite us with her insight that childhood is a qualitatively different condition from adulthood.
If children are in fact the responsibility of us all, then these guidelines need to be a first step in articulating a new contract with child citizens. Think of it as a really happy end. Ireland would find itself finally honouring the UN Convention, and political icons such as Liz O'Donnell would be spared the bad publicity of having to testify why Ireland has spent so very long dragging its heels on almost every issue of interest to the rights of the child.