Child neglect in Scotland is an epidemic and we need to talk about it

PA

Demi-Leigh had 14 teeth removed, some still her baby milk teeth, under general anaesthetic. Her mum had mental health problems and addiction issues and her stepdad was in prison.

There was no one to ensure she had a clean toothbrush and toothpaste, much less a bedtime routine, and this was the inevitable consequence. She was eight.

Taylor’s mum and dad kept a Rottweiler in a cage in the living room. There was a crossbow in the bedroom, ostensibly by way of protection, because his home was the local drug den.

The dog was regularly fed; Taylor was not. Drugs were within his reach in the fridge, food was not. At the age of 10 he was barely attending school, instead spending most of his time in unimaginably filthy conditions in the family flat.

Richie, five, was so obese he was unable to toilet on his own and none of his primary one peers would spend time with him. His isolation manifested itself in a violent, biting temper.

The violent, biting temper made him more isolated in turn.

I have, of course, changed names to protect their identities but Demi-Leigh and Taylor and Richie’s stories will be achingly familiar to anyone who sits on the children’s panel or works in a school or in a social work department or a hospital or anywhere else young people are.

These children and thousands like them are victims of a great many things, the chief of which is neglect.

Child neglect in Scotland is an epidemic. It ruins childhoods and has serious knock-on effects on wider society and future generations.

Yet we don’t really talk about child neglect in any coordinated way, despite the efforts of social work experts and academics like, say, Edinburgh University’s Brigid Daniel who has been talking about the effect of chronic neglect for decades.

And we should talk about it.

You might think this would be obvious in and of itself, but if you want to reduce such a thing as childhood to the practicalities of pounds and pence then it makes eminent good sense to tackle neglect at root.

Young people who are well supported flourish. They make a meaningful contribution to society and they fail to trouble the justice system. They are not a burden on the taxpayer but become a fiscal benefit to the state.

This week there has been politicking about the will we/won’t we matter of holding a public inquiry into child grooming gangs.

Keir Starmer sent Baroness Louise Casey to carry out a review into abuse perpetrated by grooming gangs in England and Wales.

Starmer has previously said he does not believe a public inquiry into the issue would be worthwhile but has now altered that position in light of Casey’s findings.

His change of heart has caused him problems. He has been accused of u-turning, which is never politically expedient. The opposition is having a field day, saying Labour is failing to tackle the gangs of men who are ruining the lives of girls and young women. Starmer has been accused - again - of merely following where Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has first led.

And another issue has arisen - should Scotland be included in any grooming gangs inquiry or, if not, should it hold its own? There has been an unedifying spat over the issue between the Labour MP Joani Reid and the SNP’s Pete Wishart.

Reid, MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven, said it was vital there is a grooming gangs enquiry in Scotland, despite having voted against an inquiry being set up just five months ago.

In response to Wishart’s allegations of hypocrisy, Reid said her decision to vote against the founding of an inquiry was in response to a Tory amendment to Labour’s Children and Wellbeing Bill. Reid was one of 350 Labour MPs who voted down that amendment on January 8 this year.

This kind of tit-for-tat helps no one and distracts from the fact the situation in Scotland differs from that of England. In England, eyes were averted from the abuse of young girls by Asian grooming gangs because of both a squeamishness in institutions afraid to be accused of racism and because of institutional misogyny that blamed victims for their own abuse.

Girls in Scotland are being exploited, just as they are in England, but there is no real suggestion that organised rape circles are being ignored by officials. We have a judicial system that deals with grooming gangs and child rapists.

We also already have an abuse inquiry ongoing now. The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry was set up 10 years ago, has cost millions of pounds and will cost millions more.

Reid criticised the Scottish inquiry as being too limited in scope as it only considers children in care. She is only partially right - the definition of “care” here is extremely wide-ranging. It includes children in, say, hospital or children in fee-paying boarding schools.

It would be possible to expand the inquiry to look for evidence of mass child grooming of the type in England, rather than setting up a new system. The problem with such a long-running and costly inquiry is that the can is kicked down the road, any recommendations are a long time coming and when they do come they are not implemented.

Organised child abuse is abhorrent but we should trust the justice system to deal with it. During the Covid-19 lockdown children were returned from foster placements to known situations of family neglect because there was nowhere else to put them, for example.

Social workers were unable to enter homes to carry out welfare checks. There are all sorts of knock-on effects from these elements of covid that are being quietly overlooked.

What we don’t know is the full scale of the devastating impact of child neglect, particularly post-pandemic.

If there’s a case for another national inquiry, it is this.