We all have a role to play in keeping children safe

Various agencies seem to have engaged in a somewhat futile exercise in buck-passing — futile because the public could not care less about inter-agency squabbles. All they care about is keeping their children safe, except when things go wrong, and then they expect someone to take responsibility.

It has long been a point of principle for me that safeguarding is everybody's business and that no-one can absolve themselves of responsibility by assuming that someone else will take action. That seems to me a starting point for everyone in children's services. Ministers and officials, rightly, want to ensure that systems and processes are designed to minimise risk. But this can so easily lead to regulation overlaid on regulation, with complex and bureaucratic systems. The Integrated Children's System was designed with the very best of intentions. And serious case reviews were in turn invented, strengthened, improved, strengthened again, inspected, and published. And children still die.

So who is responsible? For once, I am genuinely uncertain. Even the certainty that the person who brutalises a child must be ultimately guilty has its problems. There are people who do terrible things, there are family members and communities who turn a blind eye, there are hard-pressed professionals who make mistakes, there are systems and regulations that don't work as intended. And of course there is a fine line between encouraging legitimate whistle-blowing and allowing a Stalinist state in which secret and anonymous denunciations can destroy lives. As I say, I'm uncertain, but at least I am in good company: almost 2,000 years ago, Juvenal pondered "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", translated as "Who watches the watchers?" The uncomfortable answer is still, after all this time, we are all responsible.

John Freeman is a former director of children's services and now a freelance consultant