The lost children left at mercy of abusers during dark days of lockdown
Arthur tragedy highlights the cost of social workers unable to make regular visits during pandemic
‘For those children who are outside school, we simply don’t know what is happening to them’
The death of Arthur Labinjohughes was not only preventable, it was predictable. Throughout lockdown and beyond, children’s advocates had sounded the alarm about children becoming “invisible” to the authorities, leaving them at the mercy of abusers.
Nor is the crisis over. The latest data gathered by government departments show that tens of thousands of children who disappeared off the radar at the height of the pandemic remain out of sight. They are the forgotten victims of Covid, and the case of six-year-old Arthur may not be entirely unique.
The numbers alone paint a deeply troubling picture of what is going on.
More than 20,000 children had fallen off school registers by the time schools reopened last year. Whether they are receiving an education, let alone care and love, is impossible to know because there is no statutory register of home-educated children.
In the past year the number of referrals to children’s social care has dropped by almost 50,000, a figure charities say cannot be explained away by a sudden rise in good parenting.
Indeed, Department for Education data records 536 cases of deaths or serious harm to a child where abuse or neglect was known or suspected, a 19 per cent increase on the previous year.
Tim Loughton, the former children’s minister and acting chairman of the home affairs select committee, said that during the pandemic: “There was an increase in child abuse because of course they were off the radar. Cases such as this, that might have been detected better at school, or outside; it was all going on behind closed doors.”
And it still is, fears Anne Longfield, who stepped down as children’s commissioner this year. “For those children who are outside school, we simply don’t know what is happening with them, so this is absolutely a problem of the present,” she said.
“We need to understand why these children are not attending school because when children fall from view that can be very, very dangerous.”
In the case of Arthur, a serious review is likely to focus on the fact that the authorities had been alerted to his suffering, but failed to save him. Much has already been made of the similarities to the cases of Baby P and Victoria Climbie, both of whom were known to social services at the time they died.
When Arthur’s uncle reported his concerns to West Midlands Police, their response was to tell him that he risked arrest for breaking lockdown rules if he visited his nephew, rather than sending officers to the house to investigate his allegations.
For an unknown number of children, though, abuse is happening without anyone raising their concerns with the authorities, and it did not take Arthur’s murder to expose that fact.
In June last year the NSPCC produced a report titled Isolated and Struggling, which tried to quantify the risk of child maltreatment during lockdown.
The research behind it found the risk to children was threefold: parents struggling to cope under the financial and mental stress of lockdown; children in abusive families having “prolonged exposure to potential harm”; and the removal of the safety net provided by school attendance, health visits and other social contact.
The NSPCC suggested that there was a lack of understanding of the impact of social isolation on children, but it made the common sense point that children were far less likely to disclose abuse “while they are trapped at home with their abuser”.
The charity Childline found evidence that some victimised children were being sexually abused more frequently during lockdown. One 11-year-old child told the charity: “My dad has been sexually abusing me nearly all my life… but in lockdown dad is doing it five or six times a day.”
One way of countering this would have been home visits. Instead, many case workers were checking up on clients via Zoom, denying them the opportunity to see the bigger picture.
The Department for Education’s vulnerable children and young people survey reported that in January and February of this year, some local authorities were making 50 per cent of contacts virtually, with one social services department saying that “the majority of children on child protection and child in need plans are currently being seen remotely, following risk assessments”.
Ms Longfield said: “In some areas social workers would continue to visit the most vulnerable families throughout, but a lot of meetings went online and it’s much easier for a parent to evade the view of social workers.
“I have heard of social workers asking families to take the camera around the house, look in the fridge, but you can’t see what’s happening off-camera and you can’t pick up on what else is going on in the room.
“I was pleasedschools stayed open in lockdown for vulnerable children, but for parents trying to go off the radar, being able to say they were home-schooling was perfect cover.
“Teachers are the people children are most likely to report abuse to. At
one point in lockdown referrals to social services almost halved because children weren’t seen by teachers.”
Home visits, of course, are not foolproof. Two social workers did visit Arthur at home to check out the concerns of relatives about bruises on his back, but they reported “no concerns” after being hoodwinked by Arthur’s father and stepmother, who had coached the boy into saying his injuries were caused by play-fighting.
Yet some social services departments will be asking themselves today whether they could have done more during lockdown, as plenty of small charities and schools refused to allow Covid cautiousness to stop them carrying out face-to-face visits.
The author Polly Curtis describes in an article for The Telegraph how Kim Maynard, a child welfare officer employed by the Q3 Academy in Tipton, West Mids, visited 256 homes during lockdown after concerns that phoning families was not enough.
Some children who already had a social worker were receiving visits, but others who were being newly abused during lockdown fell through the cracks. The average social worker already has about 40 cases to handle, widely seen as too big a caseload.
Staff absence remains a problem: at the height of the pandemic last year some local authorities had almost 30 per cent of social workers unavailable because of Covid, and as recently as July this year some councils still had more than 10 per cent of their social workers absent through Covid.
Meanwhile, a snapshot of school attendance carried out by the Department for Education found that on Nov 25 this year 23 per cent of children with a social worker assigned to them were not at school.
Some schools, like the Q3 Academy, have dedicated teams working to find out why children are not in school, but campaigners like Ms Longfield believe such an approach should be universal, rather than being left to chance.
Mr Loughton said that funding for children’s social care had increased in recent years but: “The demands on children’s social care have gone up disproportionately, as well, and so too often what is happening is that we are intervening late.”
Not that abusive parents or relatives are the only danger to children that increased during lockdown. Because children were spending more time online, often alone in their bedrooms, the opportunities for paedophiles to prey on them increased proportionally.
The Internet Watch Foundation found nine million attempts to view child sexual abuse material online were made in Britain in the first month of lockdown. It also reported a sharp rise in children being groomed to share self-generated indecent images of themselves, often by adults posing as children.
Often there are understandable reasons for children being off school, such as separation anxiety that has taken root during lockdown, or a fear of eating meals outside the home, though the housing and education charity Oasis found that by encouraging families to discuss their problems with schools, nonattendance could be cut by more than 90 per cent in some areas.
For the remainder, the Department for Education warned more people are “on the edge of care with... situations reaching crisis which could be due to the impact of Covid”.
In January, the Government set up an independent review of children’s social care provision.
It is due to publish its findings in the spring, which cannot come soon enough for the unknown number of children for whom lockdown has become a byword for abuse.
‘For parents trying to go off the radar, being able to say they were homeschooling was perfect cover’