Salisbury Review: "Baby P and the Child Abuse Industry"

My piece on the Baby P case has just been published in the Spring 2009 issue of the Salisbury Review, one of the most prestigious political magazines in English. It is not fully online, but I am requesting permission to get it.

"Baby P" was a seventeen-month-old boy killed by his mother and her boyfriend. It has created a furore in Britain, with the media pointing fingers and asking all the questions but the right ones. This public discussion is at least more than has taken place in the United States.

To send a letter, go here.

Salisbury Review, Spring 2009

Baby P and the Child Abuse Industry

Written by Stephen Baskerville

The Baby P killing reveals the child abuse industry at its most cynical. The Soviet-style ineptitude revealed daily is the product not of poor training or underfunding but of the logic inherent in bureaucratic politics.

We have long known what causes child abuse and why children like Baby P die. The vast preponderance of child abuse and child deaths occurs in single-parent homes. Very little abuse takes place in married, twoparent families. London’s Family Education Trust long ago demonstrated that children are up to 33 times more likely to suffer serious abuse and 73 times more likely to suffer fatal abuse in the home of a mother with a live-in boyfriend or stepfather than in an intact family...