Let tragic Star be the last innocent failed

THE first reaction is one of heartbreak. Then incomprehension. Then boiling rage.

Rage that yet another defenceless toddler has been sadistically tortured and murdered in our supposedly civilised country.

Rage that this hideous crime was allowed to happen despite a string of red flags.

and rage that those who failed 16-monthold Star Hobson will probably never be held to account. By the time she lost the fight for life, Star had catastrophic injuries to almost every part of her tiny body.

In a regime of terror lasting months, she was punched and kicked to death by her mother Frankie Smith’s vile, psychopathic girlfriend, Savannah Brockhill.

Five times social services were alerted by concerned relatives. Five times they failed in their duty of care.

Inevitably, political correctness played its part. When Star’s great-grandparents warned ‘another Baby P’ was on the cards, social workers accused them of malice because Smith was in a same-sex relationship and her partner had a traveller background. It was an unforgivable slur, which ultimately cost Star her life.

This depressingly familiar story comes less than two weeks after the carbon copy case of six-year-old arthur Labinjo-Hughes, who was brutally murdered by his stepmother.

and yesterday an inquest heard that another toddler, Ella-Rose clover, was murdered after doctors failed to identify a sustained campaign of prior abuse.

Will anyone ever be held properly accountable for these outrages? If not, and social workers, medics and police are constantly allowed to duck the blame, lessons will never be learned.

and children will go on dying. alone, forlorn and forsaken.