It was easy to miss: minister for children Margaret Hodge this month delivered the results of the mighty national search of files of children made the subject of a care order that she commissioned in the summer. This was in the wake of the Angela Cannings appeal, in which the judges proposed that there should be no prosecution in infant death cases that depended on disputed medical evidence.
We were warned of a national scandal: hundreds of miscarriages of justice.
The triumphalism was palpable. Campaigners for accused adults had panicked the minister - who was always flaky on child protection - into ordering a trawl of records. So, 28,867 children's files were surveyed. The result? Five raised doubts as a result of disputed medical evidence. Only one is now being reconsidered by the court.
What does the minister say about that amazing scare? Nothing. This review typifies the way that the protection of vulnerable children ricochets from crisis to controversy. The Victoria Climbie disaster conjured the ghosts of Jasmine Beckford and Tyra Henry, and those children whose avoidable deaths revolutionised child protection in the 1980s, only to be stalled by outraged adults and frightened politicians.
Another child's death should haunt the extravagent Hodge review: Michael Dickinson in Cumbria. While the doctors who have transformed our understanding of children being suffocated or subjected to fabricated illness were being pilloried, in the run-up to the Cannings appeal, Michael Dickinson was being trailed around doctors and hospitals. He was slowly being killed by his mother.
According to a review published by Cumbria's local authority earlier this year, he declined from being 'a fully mobile and conversant little boy to a child who was unable to move or talk'. His mother was pouring drugs into him, convinced he was terminally ill. Medical evidence was disputed, and dispirited doctors' suspicions of fabrication were kept to themselves.
Finally, against medical advice, his mother pushed toxic drugs into his lungs. He died. She was tried and convicted in 2002.
This tragedy should never have happened, but Cumbria's review of his life and death did not arouse a review of the files on dead children, nor of the impact of political panic on their lives and deaths. We now have a minister for children, but she perpetuates the populist tradition - bounced by controversy; panicked by campaigns organised by accused adults and their advocates; pious when professionals fail to protect a child from cruel, slow death; or silent.
