When parents need as much protecting as their child

Last night BBC2 broadcast the second of its thoughtful and sympathetic programmes on the child protection service in Bristol Protecting our Children. Again, it offered us an example of its effects via a single case. If the proper test of the system is 'was the child protected?' then the answer must be, as it was last week, a resounding 'yes'. The social worker was portrayed as determined, possessed of saintly patience, yet relentlessly focused on the initially unborn child and then on the baby charmingly present in his randomly dangerous world.

The social worker was still sufficiently distressed by the statutory blade she had to wield - to remove the baby from his mother - to suffer for her pains and need time away from the frontline off sick. This was not so hard to understand on seeing her reaction to having made the decision that she no doubt knew would make for permanent separation.