Why are the lessons from child abuse inquiries not being learned?
No one could fail to have been repulsed by the pictures of the squalor in which little Declan Hainey’s body was found. Nor made heart sore by the appealing photo of the wee boy, his cherubic features and toothy grin emphasising just how young and innocent he was when murdered.
But the publication of these photographs raises myriad discomfiting issues, relating to some fairly fundamental rights – freedom of expression, public interest and privacy. Yet, missing from the equation appears to have been consideration of the rights of a murdered child, apparently rescinded in death.
Emotions always run high when a child is murdered and rightly so. Calls for an inquiry have been made and repelled. Would one more inquiry into one more child who slipped through the system actually make a jot of difference, or should we simply focus on working out what went wrong and why lessons from previous inquiries into child abuse and failings to protect vulnerable children do not appear to have been learned?
There is a need for a wider debate on the protection of vulnerable children and it’s one we all need to take part in. Keeping children safe is an expensive business, yet all over the country, budgets to child protection and wellbeing services are being cut, stretching resources to the limit, with nary a murmur from taxpayers.
It would appear that keeping children like Declan safe is not a price we are currently prepared to pay - far easier to point the finger the blame after the fact than take seriously our individual and collective responsibilities to prevent tragedies like this happening.
Publishing the photograph of Declan as he was in life might make him more human, more real, but does it really need a visual image to make that so? The decision of Lord Bonomy to allow the media to publish Declan’s photograph has been heralded as a milestone in the media’s interaction with the justice system. In this case and now potentially in others, the public right to know has been deemed greater than the family’s right to privacy.
This was an unusual case, in that often, we know exactly what a dead child looks like, long before court proceedings begin. That will be because the family has given permission for such images to be made available, often because the perpetrator has not been caught and photographs might jog the memory of a potential witness or prompt someone to come forward with information leading to an arrest.
In most of those cases, publication would be justified, if appropriate permissions have been granted.
But increasingly, the use of photographs of dead or murdered children in news stories has become a commonplace, when there is no reason for their publication, other than to humanise the story or lay bare the tragedy involved for the delectation of the viewing or reading public.
In this case, the argument was made that it’s easier for newspapers to write about court cases like this and more difficult for broadcasters because they rely on the visual medium to reach the audience. Things have indeed come to an unsavoury pass if the point of children in death is to enable journalists to do their job and produce quality news packages.
Both the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) and OfCom, the broadcasting regulator, have detailed guidance relating to under 18s: both are silent on the matter of dead children. The PCC concludes that with children under 16, editors must demonstrate “an exceptional public interest to over-ride the normally paramount interest of the child”.
Interesting then, that the justification for everyone publishing Declan’s photograph was reduced to it being the public’s “right to know”. What is it exactly that we needed to know here? Or is it just that publishing Declan’s photo was about feeding the increasingly prurient needs of the general public?
It would seem that in death as in life, we have failed Declan Hainey and failed to act in his best interests and needs. For us all to show a keener interest in the circumstances of his life after his murder is but the final insult in a short, tragic life which deserved better. A milestone may indeed have been reached, but I'm not convinced it’s a good one.
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