Abstract
The Inquiry into the death of Maria Colwell, which began in May 1973 and reported in September 1974, was, of course, a seminal moment in the history of children’s services in the UK. It provided a template for the professional response to child abuse which exists to this day (even if children are no longer placed on a ‘child abuse register’, but instead ‘made subject to a child protection plan’). And it provided a template also for subsequent child abuse inquiries, those recurring rituals of blaming, shaming, ‘learning lessons’, and ‘ensuring that this tragedy never happens again’ (to approximate phrases which are commonplace during these events), which have become a fixed feature of British life, as well as a kind of ‘folk horror’ (p. 123) which hangs over the practice of British social workers, as I know from personal experience. In this scholarly and yet very readable book, Ian Butler and Mark Drakeford try to understand both the events that led up to it, and the dynamics of the Inquiry itself, before concluding with some reflections on the legacy of Colwell in the present day.
The first two chapters are an attempt to reconstruct the events leading up to the death of Maria Colwell. The third chapter provides the policy context for these events, which occurred in the aftermath of the Seebohm report, when generic social services departments were first created through the amalgamation of a plethora of more specialist welfare services. The fourth and fifth chapters look at the Inquiry itself, and at the critique of social work that emerged from it, a critique which, they persuasively argue, persists into the present pretty much unchanged. The sixth chapter looks at the aftermath of the Inquiry in terms of legislative and policy developments. The final chapter, ‘The trial continues …’, looks at the afterlife of the Colwell scandal itself, and of the public perception of social work following on from it that has proved persistent right up to the present. The book as a whole looks at the role played by this iconic case in a key area of social policy. The scandal did not so much bring about the developments that were to follow, as provide a cause célèbre for a dynamic that would perhaps have occurred in any case.
I found Butler and Drakeford’s account of events to be very compelling. They manage to marshal evidence from a wide range of sources into a compelling narrative, while at the same time showing how the Inquiry itself, like all Inquiries, did this very same thing: take evidence and make it into a narrative which was compelling, but which was not necessarily the only narrative that could be drawn from it. (Indeed, even the Inquiry report itself included a dissenting view from Olive Stevenson.) They are interesting on the role played by hindsight in the Inquiry – ‘Council let her stay with killer’, ran one headline, but as Butler and Drakeford point out (p. 103), he was not a killer when they let her stay – and convincing too on the way that social work in particular was picked out for criticism, with a clear double standard sometimes being evident in the way social work was dealt with as compared to other professions (see p. 138).
Accusations made against social work included the still entirely familiar charges of incompetence, absence of common sense, and rigid adherence to an ideological position. All of these criticisms have persisted and are still current, though interestingly the nature of the ideological rigidity with which social workers are charged undergoes, like the magnetic polarity of the earth, or the identity of the enemy in Orwell’s 1984, periodic sudden reversals. At the time of the Colwell Inquiry, social workers were accused of privileging the ‘blood tie’ between parent and child, over the child’s own best interest. At other times the charge is that ‘happy, cared-for children can be torn from their mothers and given to strangers and … a remorseless administrative machine insists it’s all for the best’ (Daily Mail, 2005).
This is a strong book, but perhaps the least strong part of it is the final chapter. Here the authors trace the consequences of the Colwell Inquiry into the present, showing how the steady succession of Inquiries has become a kind of litany of failure, used as a rationale for an increasingly narrow, bureaucratized and deprofessionalized service. It’s all valid and important stuff, but this chapter felt a little rushed and seemed to slip occasionally into what might be called rant mode about the ‘modernised, “Ofsteded”, risk-averse, unprincipled, regressive’ thing that social work has become (p. 213). Good knockabout stuff, and I agree with most of it, but it lacked the meticulousness and care of the rest of the book.