The shock and revulsion that has greeted the murder of six-year-old Deirdre Crowley by her father has inevitably led to questions about whether the tragedy could have been prevented. Such questions are long overdue in Ireland.
While useful attention has been focused on the failures of church and State to protect sexual abuse victims and provide for troubled teenagers at risk, we have consistently failed to focus critical attention on the need for effective child protection in situations where the very lives of children are at risk. This is all the more remarkable given that - as Jim Cusack showed in Saturday's Irish Times - Deirdre's death brings to 19 the number of children who have met with non-accidental deaths here in the past 18 months, the majority at the hands of parents.
The concept of non-accidental injury (NAI) to children was created in the late 1970s when the Department of Health first introduced guidelines for professionals to help them identify children at risk and manage high risk cases. At the core of NAI is the notion that where children have injuries which do not fit the pattern of explanation given by parents, or there is some evidence from the circumstances or history of the child and parents to suggest they may not be safe, the professional system needs to click into gear and work together to protect the child.
Not surprisingly, hospitals and GPs were given a central role in identifying children at risk, for it is there that children often first present with injuries. There is considerable evidence to show that they have often failed in this regard.
The investigation into the Kilkenny incest case in 1993, for instance, showed that on many occasions the victim, Mary, presented at hospitals and GP surgeries and had been coached to give false explanations for serious injuries that had been inflicted by her father. These accounts were timidly accepted by medical personnel who failed to probe the causes of injuries that were plainly suspect in terms of NAI.
Recent research has shown that while general awareness of child abuse has increased, such problems still persist. As Maire O'Reilly and I show in our long-term study of child protection cases (see Keeping Children Safe: child abuse, child protection and the promotion of welfare, published by A&A Farmar), NAI is the primary concern in 8 per cent of cases (the most common child abuse problem by far being neglect).
Some 30 per cent of NAI referrals were reported by lay sources (parents themselves and the general public) while professional sources reported almost 70 per cent - of which schools were the most significant, reporting 22 per cent of NAI referrals. The number of NAI referrals being made by medical sources, especially hospitals and GPs, is disturbingly low when seen in the light of the large numbers of children who pass through these services, with only two NAI referrals coming through the hospital route.
Of course medical services alone are not responsible for child protection. But they are indicative of how well geared professional services are - or are not - to protect children at risk and the resources and priority we give as a society to such child protection.
It is always easy to be wise after the event, but we do need to establish what contact Deirdre Crowley had with services and, crucially, what was done by the Garda and other agencies since she disappeared in 1999 to bring her identity to the attention of professionals who have routine contact with children, as well as the public.
The Garda was clearly concerned, one commenting at the time that had Deirdre been abducted by a stranger there would be a public outcry, but because it was her father we simply accept it. This says a huge amount about our view of children's rights and how we simply accept that they are possessions of adults and that protecting family privacy is the ultimate priority.
IT simply isn't good enough for any child to disappear off the face of the earth without a systematic effort to use all the resources of the State to trace her. By any definition, whatever his motives in a tug-of-love scenario, Christopher Crowley abused his daughter by tearing her away from her family and community, and then perpetrated the ultimate form of child abuse by taking her life.
The fact is that we have always been very slow to implement real child protection policies. When, in 1987, the Department of Health produced new comprehensive child abuse guidelines (which are in most respects still operative today), they did little or nothing to train professionals in their use, or even to let them know of their existence.
Little wonder, then, that research in the 1990s showed that many key professionals such as GPs had never even heard of the guidelines, never mind used them or recognised they had a role to play in identifying and protecting suspected abuse children.
The new Department of Health and Children child protection guidelines, Children First, are currently being implemented by health boards and there are signs that the State is being more accountable now as a coherent effort is being made to bring the many potentially useful protocols they introduce to the attention of the key professionals.
Yet we are still a long way off developing a strong child protection system. Even with the new guidelines, there is still no systematic procedure for tracking children at risk through the contact they have with health and social services, such as the child protection registers which have been used in the UK since the 1970s.
Children's names can only be placed on such registers by case conferences of professionals, and the register can be checked by any professional who has a concern about a child. Thus if the name of a missing child at risk is on the register, along with a systematic effort to alert people to what she looked like, any suspected sightings enable professionals to check the register and protective actions to follow.
A crucial implication of the Crowley case is that we need such a child protection register and that the names of all abducted children need to be placed on it to aid detection and protection.
The importance of the Garda inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the way the case was handled cannot be over-exaggerated, but it is not nearly enough. We also need an inquiry by the Department of Health and Children into the contact Deirdre Crowley may have with public services, an investigation which needs to extend to examining the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the 18 other children recently murdered in this State.
This need not just be to establish blame and accountability for what happened, but to promote learning about future child protection so that everything in our power can be done to prevent such appalling tragedies ever happening again.
Harry Ferguson is professor of social policy and social work at University College Dublin