The child murder epidemic:

Deaths as shocking and avoidable as Baby P's happen every single week

By Peter Oborne

Last updated at 3:20 AM on 10th July 2009

As a nation, we became obsessed with the case of Baby P. We winced at the details of his unbelievably cruel death at the hands of his mother and her vicious boyfriend.

We were angered by the failure of social services to protect this innocent little boy from harm.

If there was any consolation in the outcry that followed, it was the thought that, in 21st-century Britain, such cases were rare. But this is a dangerously mistaken impression.

Sadly, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the ordeal of Baby P, or of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie - another notorious case of violence and neglect ten years earlier.

Deaths every bit as terrible as theirs take place nearly every week in this country, largely unnoticed and unreported.

The numbers are rising all the time, as a unique survey carried out for the Channel 4 Dispatches programme reveals.

For six months, researchers trawled through social service inquiries and reports from courts and inquests up and down the country.

The Freedom of Information Act had to be invoked to get some councils to release key documents.

In the end, we uncovered a total of 183 child killings between 2004 and 2008 attributed to a parent, a parent's partner or a carer.

In 2004, there were 29. The number doubled to 55 in 2007. The trend is upwards; shamingly so.

For a supposedly civilised society, the statistics make chilling reading . Two-thirds of the 183 victims were under five.

A third were less than a year old. Most were beaten to death, stabbed, smothered or strangled.

In nearly three-quarters of the cases, the killers were either the child's mother or father (and on rare occasions both).

One-fifth of deaths involved the mother's partner or new boyfriend. Men were twice as likely to kill as women.

But look behind the figures to the reality of these tortured lives and the picture that emerges is almost Dickensian in its horror.

For example, James Howson placed his 16-month-old daughter Amy - already skeletal from under-nourishment - across his knee and pressed down so hard he broke her back.

A mortem revealed 40 other wounds inflicted on her in the four weeks before her death, including six fractures to her arms and legs.

Howson had progressed from wife beating to child-beating - a not unusual phenomenon.

He had been expelled from school for violence, with a warning from a teacher that 'this boy will commit murder'.

The research pinpoints the breakup of a marriage or live-in relationship as a particularly dangerous time for children.

For example, after Lyn Philcox ended her eight-year marriage to husband Brian, he demanded custody of their children, Amy and Owen, stalked them on their way to school and put emotional pressure on them, trying to prise them from their mother.

The courts gave him limited access. On the day the divorce was finalised, he took them on an agreed outing, knocked them out with chloroform and killed them and himself with the exhaust fumes from his car.

Our findings show that 20 children died on access visits like this, and the separation of parents was a factor in a quarter of all the killings.

After his wife left him because of his violent and drunken ways, Chris Hawkins stabbed his 14-year-old daughter Donna and four-year-old son Ryan.

Donna survived the frenzied attack, but little Ryan, with nine wounds in his arms and chest, died.

But it is not just men who commit these dreadful crimes. Ms G had once been sectioned and was on medication to control her schizophrenia.

Convinced that her two children were not hers, she suffocated three-year-old Keniece with clingfilm and battered ten-year-old Antoine with a hammer before strangling him.

In another case, Jael Mullings was a young and devoted mother. Living alone, with a history of depression, she could not cope.

After reaching a crisis point, she stabbed her two young sons through their hearts. But blaming her entirely for that terrible double tragedy is wrong.

We now know that she was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. After the birth of her second son, Dalayno, three months before the deaths, she was also suffering from post-natal depression and asked the authorities for help.

But, according to her family, all she received was childcare. She wasn't given a mental health assessment.

On the day of the killings, she had begged her local health centre to have her children taken into care.

Her behaviour was so out of control that the police were involved. But no one acted decisively until it was too late. In her story - as in all the others quoted here - there were warning signs that, had they been picked up, might have prevented these deaths.

If only health visitors who called at the Howson home to see little Amy had demanded to know why her father wouldn't let them in.

If only the family courts had not authorised contact between the unstable Brian Philcox and his children.

If only mental health workers had made sure that Antoine and Keneice's mother was taking her medication before she was allowed unsupervised by Peter Oborne access to them.

If only Jael Mullings' mental health deterioration had been picked up sooner and acted upon. If only . . .

It is a sobering fact that half the children who died were known to social services and somehow slipped through the net of officialdom to their deaths.

But, just as significantly, half had never been referred to the authorities: they weren't even in the net.

This is the real nature of the crisis I believe we are facing in this country. Our obsession with Baby P has not only proved unhelpful in disguising from us the true extent of child killing, it has also distracted policymakers from asking the right questions.

Because Baby P was on a child protection register, the overriding issue became the spectacular failure of Haringey social services in its legal duty to look after his welfare

However, our study showed failure of this kind was extremely unusual. There are around 30,000 children in the UK on child protection plans, yet, on average, only two of them are killed each year by parents or carers.

This is two too many, of course. But the fact is that, contrary to public perception, social workers appear, on the whole, remarkably good at safeguarding children - once they are on child protection registers.

But only 11 of the 163 children in our study were on registers at the time of their deaths. The vast majority - some 93 per cent of the cases we examined - involved children who were not on protection registers.

The policy consequences of this are dramatic. Even if, in the aftermath of Baby P, the Government carries out its pledge that social workers won't fail those on child protection registers ever again, then we'll only ever save two, maybe three, lives a year.

What won't be addressed is the bigger problem: those thousands of children who live in deadly peril but are not identified as at risk.

We need to identify them early, and protect them before it is too late. But is such a course of action possible?

Official doctrine says no. Whenever a child dies and abuse or neglect is suspected, local authorities are obliged to carry out what is known as a 'serious case review', many of which we examined in our survey.

But, as we discovered, it is commonplace for these reviews to shy away from apportioning blame, and to conclude that the particular child's death was impossible to predict - and therefore impossible to prevent.

The implication is that child killing is random. It might happen to anyone, anywhere, and at any time. However, I strongly challenge this view.


Brother and sister Owen and Amy Philcox: Killed by their father on the day his divorce from their mother was finalised

This new research shows that deaths very rarely come 'out of the blue'. The vast majority of child killings fall into clear categories - and almost all the ones we examined had clear lessons for preventing such tragedies happening again.

For example, the figures show quite clearly that children of violent parents are most at risk.

In nearly half the cases, parents who killed had a history of violence to their adult partners.

Most were known to the police, health visitors or social workers for their uncontrolled behaviour.

Yet only two of these children were deemed sufficiently at risk to be registered as needing protection.

Toddler Ryan Hawkins was not one of them. Yet when we talked to his big sisters (something that, apart from one brief phone call, social services never did), we discovered repeated warning signs that their father, Chris, could be a danger to children.

He once gripped his daughter Natalie around the neck, and social services were alerted after her sister Donna confided to a school nurse that her father had hit her and that she was so afraid of him that she felt suicidal.

But no proper risk assessment was done, despite the fact that Hawkins had also been charged by the police with raping his own wife, Val.

Val felt let down because social services never warned her of the extra risk to children when parents split up. If they had, she would have done something to stop Ryan going to see his dad.

All agencies need to realise that separation is the time of maximum danger for children, especially if there is a background of violence in the household.

Nor does barring a violent parent from the family home necessarily mean that children are safe. As we have seen, 20 children were killed on access visits, four of them on unsupervised visits ordered by the courts.

The message is simple: when mothers leave violent or obsessively controlling partners, the children need special protection, particularly if that partner is unable to accept the break-up.

The arrival of a new partner can be another danger point. Twenty-two children were killed by the mother's new boyfriend, usually within three months of moving in.

Most of these new men had known the mother for less than six months. It is clear, too, that the authorities should be alert to parents with serious mental health problems, which was an issue in one in four of the child homicide cases we examined.

Drugs were another factor. One in five died at the hands of addict parents. The fact that some were undergoing treatment for their addiction was no safeguard.

Seven children died after ingesting methadone - the heroin substitute offered to addicts.

Six years have now passed since Lord Laming's very thorough report into the murder of Victoria Climbie (who was tortured by her great aunt and her boyfriend in 2000) made 108 recommendations.

A 'progress report' following Baby P's death made another 50 or so recommendations earlier this year.

But these recommendations are not necessarily being acted upon. The key agencies say they don't have the money to make all the changes demanded.

But lack of resources is not the principal issue here. What matters is a change of attitude.

Social workers, health visitors, police, GPs, the probation service, school teachers and members of the public must take on board the plain fact that far too many children are failing to get the protection they need. If we are to prevent many more from dying, we must first acknowledge the seriousness of domestic violence.

Most children living in violent homes are known to the authorities, yet most do not qualify for child protection. This is a scandal.

Then we must recognise that the vast majority of these killings are behind closed doors - and that perhaps it's time we prised open these doors. Persistent failure to attend routine medical check-ups featured in 20 of the killings we studied, and yet there was no follow-up.

Missed appointments should trigger concern. Perhaps it should also be made compulsory for children to be seen in their homes by health visitors at least once a year. Above all, social workers need to listen if they are to save lives.

It was stunning to discover that in 11 deaths, parents had specifically warned relatives, friends, colleagues, GPs or psychiatrists that they intended to kill their children and themselves.

Yet no one took them seriously enough to do anything. There also needs to be more listening after the event. In the reports we saw of internal social services inquiries into what went wrong in particular cases, it was rare that anyone had bothered to ask relatives of the dead children for their opinion.

When consultation did take place, it was usually superficial - as if the views of the people in the best position to advise on how to prevent these horrors happening again were immaterial.

This arrogant refusal to include those most intimately involved in child homicide cases seems to run throughout the whole system. It must stop.

What must also stop is the purely advisory nature of official guidelines for child protection. They need to be mandatory on local authorities, with sanctions if they are not followed.

Only then can we begin to stem this tragic tidal wave of easily preventable deaths among the most vulnerable in our society.

Dispatches: The Children Britain Betrayed is on Channel 4 on Monday at 8pm.

Oh God Dogwood! This is so heart-wrenching! What a depressing society we live in.....HOW do these evil monsters find it in their hearts to harm a beautiful innocent child? Their eyes shining so brightly, full of hope and future and trust!!! I swear, no matter how much of this stuff I read, and watch on TV, I can never seem to be hardened to it. It gets to me every bloody time.

Thank you for posting this, it's very informative and worth a rep point x

This is sickening!

I dont know how people can harm a poor defenseless child....

Cowards all of them! Cowards who should be hung drawn and quartered!!!

There is no excuse for this....it should be a life for a life...take a childs life with ill intent and be killed yourself! That will make other parents who think about killing their child wake up and smell the coffee!