What the commentators said

This tragedy was “not only preventable, it was predictable”, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph. Throughout lockdown, experts sounded the alarm about children stuck at home “at the mercy of abusers”. Yet in the past year, referrals to children’s social care have fallen by almost 50,000, even as deaths or serious harm to children suspected or known to be suffering abuse or neglect rose by 19%. In Arthur’s case, the abuse escalated when Hughes moved in with Tustin at the start of lockdown, said Amy Jones on UnHerd. And as he wasn’t going to school, the usual checks and safety nets, which could have saved him, were lost. That left him at the mercy of almost unimaginable cruelty, said Sarah Ditum in The Sunday Times. Beaten and starved, Arthur was left “so weak he could barely stand”. “No one loves me,” he can be seen crying, in footage taken shortly before his death. Eventually, Hughes told Tustin by text to “just end him”: she did so by hitting his head against a hard surface with such violence that the impact was said to be equivalent to the force of “a high-speed road traffic collision”.

The failings can’t all be attributed to lockdown, said Ian Acheson in The Spectator; they were also the result of “our broken child protection system”. Last year, there were over 6,000 vacancies in child and family social work; many jobs are being done by temporary staff. Experienced social workers able to see through abusers’ deceptions are “burned out”; some have caseloads of 30 or more. There’s a cultural problem, too, said Sonia Sodha in The Observer. It lies in the widely held view that “care is to be avoided at all costs because it is detrimental to a child’s interests”. Of course, parents who can provide safe homes should be supported in doing so. Yet we must also accept that children are better off in care than with abusive or neglectful parents. If we are to learn from this tragedy, we must start by accepting that a wish to maintain the family unit can be at odds with the need to protect children.