Maria Colwell Inquiry Report Essay
FROM MARIA COLWELL TO VICTORIA CLIMBIE: REFLECTIONS ON A GENERATION OF PUBLIC INQUIRIES INTO CHILD ABUSE Plenary paper by Professor Nigel Parton for the BASPCAN conference, July 2003 (published in Child Abuse Review (2004), 13 (2), pp80-94)
In his statement to the House of Commons when presenting Lord Laming’s Inquiry Report into the death of Victoria Climbié, on 28 January 2003, the Secretary of State for Health, Alan Milburn, said:
It is an all too familiar cry. In the past few decades there have been dozens of inquiries into awful cases of child abuse and neglect. Each has called on us to learn the lesson of what went wrong. Indeed, there is a remarkable consistency in both what went wrong and what is advocated to put it right. Lord Laming’s Report goes further. It recognises that the search for a simple solution or a quick fix will not do. It is not just national standards, or proper training, or …show more content…
These differences are indicative of the different times in which they are produced. The Maria Colwell inquiry report is much smaller in terms of the size of the pages and is 120 pages in length, consisting of approximately 50,000 words. It has a very official looking green cover to it, which was common for its time and has the Department of Health and Social Security, together with the official insignia on the cover, and is published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. It is entitled ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the care and supervision provided in relation to Maria Colwell’. It is written by the inquiry team which consisted of three people, chaired by a QC, but has a minority report from one of its members, Olive Stevenson, who had a different interpretation of some of the key elements and decisions, particularly in the way the case was handled prior to Maria being placed on a supervision order and returned home to her mother and stepfather from foster
In his statement to the House of Commons when presenting Lord Laming’s Inquiry Report into the death of Victoria Climbié, on 28 January 2003, the Secretary of State for Health, Alan Milburn, said:
It is an all too familiar cry. In the past few decades there have been dozens of inquiries into awful cases of child abuse and neglect. Each has called on us to learn the lesson of what went wrong. Indeed, there is a remarkable consistency in both what went wrong and what is advocated to put it right. Lord Laming’s Report goes further. It recognises that the search for a simple solution or a quick fix will not do. It is not just national standards, or proper training, or …show more content…
These differences are indicative of the different times in which they are produced. The Maria Colwell inquiry report is much smaller in terms of the size of the pages and is 120 pages in length, consisting of approximately 50,000 words. It has a very official looking green cover to it, which was common for its time and has the Department of Health and Social Security, together with the official insignia on the cover, and is published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. It is entitled ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the care and supervision provided in relation to Maria Colwell’. It is written by the inquiry team which consisted of three people, chaired by a QC, but has a minority report from one of its members, Olive Stevenson, who had a different interpretation of some of the key elements and decisions, particularly in the way the case was handled prior to Maria being placed on a supervision order and returned home to her mother and stepfather from foster