A face and a name come to light


4:40 pm - August 11th 2009

by Neil Robertson    


Tweet       Share on Tumblr

Tracey-Connelly-the-mothe-003

Is she as you imagined her? The slackened jaw; the furrowed brow; the baffled, vacant expression. Does she fit the image you had of the callous, ‘sex-obsessed slob‘ who puffed smoke, glugged booze and watched porn whilst her boyfriend & lodger tortured her son to death?

Ultimately, of course, it doesn’t matter. It won’t bring Peter Connelly back, won’t prevent further abuses from happening, won’t stop other helpless little boys & girls from being murdered by the people in their care. All it satisfies is some short-lived curiosity for a face & a name.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t still relevant, important questions to be asked two years after this child’s death. Has Haringey Council improved its provision and oversight of social services so that evidence of abuse is acted upon quickly & decisively? Have other councils assessed their own departments to ensure a similar tragedy couldn’t occur? Are we confident that we’re able to provide enough support for victims of abuse to help them avoid inflicting similar cruelties on their own families?

Another important question, posed here by Sandra Laville, is why the death of Peter Connelly caused such a tremendous expression of anger, but similar deaths by abusive parents have not. Laville highlights the three-year-old Tiffany Wright, who was starved to death by her mother and left in a filthy, beetle-infested bedroom for three days. Then there was the case of Amy Howson, a 16-month-old girl whose father inflicted several limb fractures, gave her a serious head wound and broke her spine in two places. Sure, both of these cases were reported by the local & national media, but they passed by very quietly compared to the weeks of high-profile coverage from Haringey. Since Baby Peter’s death, there have been 30 other cases of children dying from abuse. I bet you can’t name 5 of them.

So how do we explain this inconsistency? Was it because the child was first known only by his initial, and that the shortening of his name seemed to symbolise the neglect & horror visited upon him? Was it because this death happened in London, and it was easier for the media to amass outside Haringey council than it was Sheffield or Doncaster? Was it because we need to believe that such abuses are singular abberations and don’t want to consider that they’re more frequent? Or was it just a quirk of the news cycle and the coverage of his death would’ve been the same as these other tragedies had different events been dominating the news? You’ll notice that there are far more questions here than I’m willing to answer.

Also left outstanding is the direction the country’s social services will take in the coming years. The ferocity of the reaction to the ‘Baby P’ case had both positive & negative aspects. On the positive side, we could see some sensible reporting around the case, and there were serious questions asked by dedicated journalists & public servants which helped improve our understanding of social work in Haringey and beyond. In addition, the case clearly demonstrated failures in management, and the public outcry meant that the pressure for reform and accountability was irresistible.

However, it also mutated into one of the most unpleasant media witch hunts we’ve seen in recent years, with blame being tossed in every direction and these overwhelmingly dedicated, over-worked and under-paid social workers being held personally responsible for failures which were not entirely their own.

After the murder of Victoria Climbie caused a similar outcry back in 2000, the government responded by introducing Every Child Matters – a well-meaning initiative which culminated in the 2004 Children Act and has had some positive effects. However, when this was implemented by the social services, it lead to what some have called an ‘audit culture‘, creating more bureacracy at the expense of actually going out and doing casework.

Social workers were complaining about the extent of this bureacracy even before baby Peter met his death, with CommunityCare reporting that a third spent 60% of their working days doing administration. The task for the government faces is figuring out how to free these people from their desks whilst improving management and accountability, and how they do that remains to be seen.

So yes, there’s still much to discuss about the death of this tragic child – many unanswered questions, plenty of unresolved debates. In comparison, finding out the identities of his killers seems pretty small fry.

  Tweet   Share on Tumblr   submit to reddit  


About the author
Neil Robertson is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He was born in Barnsley in 1984, and through a mixture of good luck and circumstance he ended up passing through Cambridge, Sheffield and Coventry before finally landing in London, where he works in education. His writing often focuses on social policy or international relations, because that's what all the Cool Kids write about. He mostly blogs at: The Bleeding Heart Show.
· Other posts by


Story Filed Under: Blog ,Equality ,Local Government ,Media ,Our democracy

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.


Reader comments


1. noughtpointzero

About a year ago there was a case about a guy who was baby sitting a very young baby and raped her – possibly repeatedly. He was eventually caught but oddly, I don’t rememeber any public outrage over him, which is weird considering that his crime was pretty severe. Maybe with the Baby P thing it’s to do with how long they got away with it for, how brazen they were?

In comparison, finding out the identities of his killers seems pretty small fry.

The identity thing is irrelevant…*except that* part of the reason the poor buggers on Harringey Council were scapegoated so much was that the people who actually harmed the kid were (for very good reasons, and only ever planned to be temporarily) anonymous and so couldn’t be pilloried.

Had the press been able to run Tracy Connelly’s name and photo at the end of the trial, together with the demented ‘EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL!!!!!’ coverage the Sun and DM have been churning out today, I can’t imagine they’d have had the energy or interest to run anything like the campaign of vilification they pursued against Sharon Shoesmith for being, erm, a bit overpromoted.

3. Shatterface

Agree with john b: the anonymity – necessary for the surviving kids, and also for the trial over the two-year old rape victim – meant the press had to look elsewhere for hate figures.

There are obvious lessons to be learned by the social services and the coverage had shown how certain parts of the media regard this as an excuse for bashing the working class in general, or for justifying their own dubious moral crusades but I don’t think you can read more into this regarding the public’s apparent fascination than you can read into why a particular song is popular for a few weeks.

The father of the two convicted men chose to change his family name to disassociate himself from them. It clearly wasn’t a solution that provides him anonymity (after all, the press have located him for comments post trial) — but perhaps the distance of changing name provides a form of separation that comforts him.

How much good is provided by naming the mother of Peter? Three other children are affected by this disclosure — Peter’s siblings and a new one. They’re going to have to grow up with new names and be told bewildering tales about why they cannot have contact with their mother (but two can have contact with their natural father who is not associated with Peter’s death). When they are 18, they’ll ask for a birth certificate and new questions will emerge.

To me, everything about this name disclosure is unpleasant. Revealing the name of the perpetrators does nothing for the survivors or for innocent relatives. It makes their lives harder. So whilst I agree with John B that anonymity shifts press focus from the culpable to the negligent, I find the argument minor given the harm that is caused to the innocents.

And according to the press, Peter’s mother appears unrepentant. We all know about selective quotation and thus take such stories with a pinch of salt. Her sentence is long enough for some form of rehabilitation, but she’ll probably still be fertile when she is released with a new identity. Deal with that as a liberal, because she is an abuse victim too and deserves the chance to become a citizen. If that is what she learns to choose.


Reactions: Twitter, blogs
  1. Liberal Conspiracy

    : A face and a name come to light http://bit.ly/pCA1f

  2. Liberal Conspiracy

    : A face and a name come to light http://bit.ly/pCA1f

  3. socialworkuk

    RT @libcon Liberal Conspiracy ยป A face and a name come to light http://bit.ly/f5MBx





Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.