Learning from Baby P is Sharon Shoesmith’s detailed and comprehensive account of the media-driven witch-hunt that followed the 2007 rape and murder of a 17 month old child, Peter Connelly or “Baby P,” at the hands of his mother, her boyfriend and her brother. Media and politicians stirred up a frenzy of public hostility that blamed care professionals for the tragedy, letting loose a watercourse of vengeance that culminated in Shoesmith’s termination as Haringey Council’s Director of Education and Children’s Social Care Services. The whole affair had far-reaching effects on social care services across the U.K. This book is Shoesmith’s sincere attempt to understand the events and motivations behind the attitudes and events of that disastrous year and a third.

Shoesmith’s account takes a theoretical stance she calls “critical realism”; that is, she assumes that the causes of a particular phenomenon are multi-layered and complex. She assumes too that people’s notions of “reality” are structured by perceptions and concepts and their reactions and responses to those notions arise from the interplay of inner and outer experiences. In short, representations of reality are always unique interpretations grounded in personal and social histories. The task of critical realism is to unpick the knots of those complex interconnections between the psyche and the social as they develop over time and space in an attempt to understand the mechanisms and processes that give rise to the particular interpretations that ultimately manifest. In this case, Shoesmith’s critical realism traces the psychosocial dynamics of the various responses to the death of Baby P in an attempt to understand the multiple interpretations of the tragedy and the network of understanding that developed around the event. Shoesmith draws upon a range of “naturally occurring” documentation in her search for understanding, including media coverage, public opinions voiced on social media and in newspapers, political discourse, emails among various civil servants, including inspectors, documents (17 drafts) from the inquiry known as the Haringey Joint Area Review or JAR, and 2 Serious Case Reviews (SCRs) into the death of Peter Connelly.

To set the scene of our understanding, Shoesmith exposes that familial child homicide is relatively rare (affecting one in a quarter of a million children annually), but two-thirds of those victims are under five years old and in the first year of life, children are eight times more likely to be killed by a family member. With three in five of its children living in poverty, the district of London, England, where Baby P died, Haringey, ranks the eighth highest district in London, and the eleventh highest district in England, for childhood poverty, with one quarter of its population under the age of twenty, three quarters from minority ethnic groups, and a significant number of refugee and asylum seeking children. “At the time of Peter’s death, Haringey Council, through its children’s services, had responsibilities for the 55,000 children who spoke 160 languages between them” (p. 30). Haringey also bore the burden of three memorable tragedies before Peter’s death, including the killing of seven-year-old Victoria Climbié (2001) by her great aunt and boyfriend, an event that had racial overtones since perpetrators, the police officer, and social workers were all black. An inquiry was launched into Victoria’s death (Laming Inquiry) that offered no criticism of government policy and instead focused its attention on the need for: research on child abuse, modernization of social services, and interagency collaborations in child abuse investigations, thus drawing attention to this district and this group of care workers and deflecting attention away from the fact that child abuse is a problem nationwide, identified across all eight inspectorates and thus a matter of general political concern. By the time of Peter Connelly’s murder, Haringey was well known and had become, in Shoesmith’s terms (after Sarah Ahmed, 2004),”sticky”, because past unfortunate events were sticking to its name in the public mind and negative connotations had become so prevalent that its bad reputation had begun to pass as “common knowledge.”

Shoesmith supplies not only this rich recent historical account of Haringey, to demonstrate the “sticky” negative residue in the public mind, but she places this recent history in the context of other commonly accepted “socially constructed” beliefs that had developed over the previous half century in the optimism of the new British welfare state. She offers the reader a fascinating tour through social history and public attitudes about the “sentimentalization of childhood” and the “idealization of the mother/child relationship,” demonstrating the enormous effect these ideas had on the way that care professionals practiced and in particular on the growing politicization of the social work profession.

She traces too the evolution of the power of social workers, from their height of grace as experts in understanding the effects of poverty and inequality on families and as teachers entrusted to deliver enlightened child-rearing habits to inadequate mothers, to their fall from grace in the latter part of the twentieth century when political opportunists marginalized, and then finally silenced, their radical voice. Increasingly social workers were positioned as responsible for the social disease of child abuse they were called to cure and ultimately the weight of this responsibility caused social care professionals to begin sequestering information about the incidence of child abuse in their districts to promote and renew confidence in their services.  The hiding of abuse from public view ultimately proved counterproductive for boosting trust in professional services, because the lack of news about incidents of child abuse shaped the cultural narrative that child abuse is an anomaly that inheres only in certain problematic districts where social worker oversight is careless. So when high profile cases, such as the murders of James Bulger (1993) and Victoria Climbié (2001), hit the headlines, the cultural narrative was ripe for highly emotional public outcries that held professionals to blame for these tragedies and a general denial of the complexity of the causes of this social disease and the difficulty of recognizing and tackling this thorny problem.

Shoesmith is meticulous in her detail as she walks us through the history of public attitudes up the Baby P murder, and then throughout the aftermath witch-hunt to blame professionals for that tragedy. Her treatment of this difficult history is surprisingly objective, fair to all parties, and well argued, given that she is subjectively tied up in this history, as one of the prominent victims in the witch-hunt that destroyed so many professional careers. The journey through this history is thrilling and tortuous. This careful study hit very close to home for me, because in an early paper analyzing the James Bulger case, I argued that the two ten-year-old perpetrators, who were vilified as “evil monsters” in the press and then tried as adults, were actually victims of a system of public officials who had failed them; police, teachers, and social workers all knew of the violent abuse suffered by both these children, but were ineffective in stepping in to interrupt the ten year history of violent abuse that turned these kids into “monsters.” The talk of “evil” in the media, and by police and other public officials, I argued, shut down the need to understand the boys’ problems, because evil cannot be rationally explained. One ought always be grateful for the opportunity to reconsider one’s conclusions and see other sides of complex situations, so I am personally grateful for Sharon Shoesmith’s expertly crafted analysis of this later tragedy that tracks the disastrous fallout for so many people when the pendulum of public rancor swings the opposite direction and removes the spotlight of guilt from the guilty parties, the murderers, and places it on those professionals who are doing their best often against overwhelming odds of ever increasing numbers of abject families and ever-dwindling personnel and resources.

This is an excellent read for academics and educated readers. It composes a perspicuous analysis of the fickle and volatile public mind, the cruel details of social media hit-posts, the power of the press over political voice and action, and the breadth of the effects of all these brutal forces on individual professionals and families in support care. The book reads like a disturbing psychological thriller and the reader cannot put the book down, despite knowing from the outset how the story will end. Well done, Doctor Shoesmith!

© 2017 Wendy C. Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D. (Philosophy), North Carolina A&T State University.