Guess I picked the wrong week to complain about the state stealing peoples children.
I stand by what I wrote. The lives being destroyed in the way I described - that is happening all the time. You don't hear about it because, as Camilla Cavendish explained in her award-winning articles, it is illegal to report it.
Cases like "Baby P", and Victoria Climbié are so rare as to be negligible in comparison. One could, rightly, argue that there is no number of murdered children that is "acceptable", but there may be a number that is impossible to reduce. Until vast improvements are made to the care system, we should not be trying to push ever more children into it. One death every few years, against hundreds of lives wrecked in secret by breaking up families - there is no comparison.
Now, the one every few years that we see are in spite of the efforts of social workers. Since I am arguing for them to do less, I have to admit that the result could be more Baby Ps. Again, I think that more children would be protected by helping those already without their families than by taking more children away from their families.
Evidence? Well, it's hard to know, isn't it? But there's an "eyes closed" argument here: children who are harmed by their parents in spite of social workers end up on the front of newspapers for weeks. Children wrongly taken from their families are never heard of because it is illegal to talk about it. Which of the two problems are going to happen more often?