ABSTRACT
Introduction Public inquiries into child abuse are held when society is seriously worried about the way professionals handled particular cases. Their purpose is to analyse what went wrong (if anything) and to identify lessons to prevent a recurrence. Unfortunately, public concern is biased. Child welfare services have a broad remit, ranging from supporting families who are struggling to care adequately for their children, to protecting children from highly dangerous parents. Public interest is aroused only by certain types of adverse outcomes, predominantly deaths and, occasionally, the removal of children from their parents on what seems insubstantial grounds. Gaps in other areas of service, such as failure to provide adequate preventive and supportive services, get less public scrutiny. They lead to less extreme adverse results and these outcomes have a less clear-cut causal connection to professional actions or omissions. They are a concern to professionals and, intermittently, to politicians but less so to contemporary British society in general where parenting is seen as primarily a private rather than a social responsibility. As a result of this biased interest, the impact of inquiries has been to prioritise the child protective functions against a backdrop of professionals struggling, with varying degrees of success, to continue to meet the broader remit of child welfare.
