When the whistleblowing social worker Nevres Kemal wrote to the department of health about the inadequacies of child protection in the London council of Haringey, she eventually got a response from the Department for Children, Schools and Families. It informed her that “proper procedures have been followed”.

As a matter of fact, they had. At this point we should recall the words of Lord Laming on the response of Haringey’s social services to his investigations into the murder in 2000 of the eight-year-old Haringey resident Victoria Climbié: “Too often they attempted to justify their position in terms of bureaucratic activity rather than in outcomes for children.”

A similar spirit characterised the response of Sharon Shoesmith, the director of Haringey’s “children’s services”, with its tin-eared insistence that she and her colleagues had nothing to apologise for over their handling of the case of Baby P, brutalised to death within a few hundred yards of the property where Victoria Climbie met a similar fate.

In this context it is not surprising that various newspapers have chosen to present Shoesmith and her colleagues as responsible for the agonising death of 17-month-old P. “Blood on their hands” was the front-page headline summarising one paper’s view of the Haringey social workers involved in P’s case – and it published a lineup of their mug-shots, like so many murderous criminals.

Yet these women – and they were all women – are neither murderous nor criminal. They do not even appear to have been indolent, unlike in the Climbié case: P was put on the “at risk” register and his home was visited more than 60 times. While they were certainly naive in their assessment of P’s mother, boyfriend and “lodger” (all of whom have been convicted) and lamentably optimistic in their view that P did not require immediate removal into care, their performance was inadequate rather than wicked.

Indeed, if anyone in the country could truly be described as traumatised by P’s horrific fate, other than the boy’s father, it must be the social workers who took the decision to leave him with his mother and her sadistic boyfriend; and however much it infuriates politicians and the press seeking more people to blame than those properly convicted for the murder, Shoesmith was tactlessly accurate when she declared: “The child was killed by members of his own family and not by social services. The very sad fact is that we can’t stop people who are determined to kill children.”

In this country two children a week, on average, are killed as a result of physical abuse in the home. It is only the most horrific that impinge on the public consciousness. After each of them the government of the day tends to launch an inquiry, at the end of which the author of the report will declare, to universal approval, “never again”. Thus the final words of Laming, when publishing the report on Climbié’s murder, were: “Too many inquiries have had to be held following terrible harm to a child. I and my colleagues hope that this will be the last.” Next, please.

The first of these inquiries was provoked by the death of seven-year-old Maria Colwell in 1973; her violent end came despite more than 30 calls that had been made to social services by neighbours, concerned about her condition and treatment (those were the days). The Wave Trust charity recently produced a grim list of the most disturbing cases that have followed over the intervening 35 years. Jasmine Lorrington, battered to death at the age of four in 1984; 20-month-old Martin Nicoll, who died of 68 injuries in 1991; Lauren Wright, 6, starved and beaten to death in 2000; two-year-old Ainlee Labonte, ditto, in January 2002; and 21 month old John Gray, who died as a result of 200 injuries, including a ruptured liver, in 2003.

At the end of this appalling litany of suffering, the charity asks: “Why do parents kill their children?” Yet even the question is misleading. In only one of these cases was the child killed by his or her biological parent. Four were battered to death by men described as “stepfathers”. The fatal blow to Wright was inflicted by her stepmother. Of Wave Trust’s little victims, only Labonte met her end at the hands of her biological parents.

It is remarkable, when you think of how much the wicked stepparent has featured in children’s literature down the ages, that this correlation is so rarely remarked upon – ignored in favour of arguments based entirely on parental alcohol or drug abuse, poverty and lack of education.

The only politician who put his finger on the point last week was Iain Duncan Smith.

He observed that: “The growth in broken families has been mirrored by the huge increase in the number of children considered to be ‘at risk’ – 1.5m fall into this category. Children living with their natural mother and a guesting father are eight times more likely to be on the at-risk register.”

The government has been strangely reluctant to commission research into this correlation, but fortunately the work has been done by Canadian academics in a 1994 paper entitled “Some differential attributes of lethal assaults on small children by stepfathers versus genetic fathers”. Professors Martin Daly and Margo Wilson refer back to American research in 1980 which showed that “the youngest children (aged 0-2) incurred about 100 times greater risk at the hands of stepparents than of genetic parents”.

Daly’s and Wilson’s own research into deaths of children up to the age of five leads them to state that “homicide risk from stepfathers was approximately 60 times higher than from genetic fathers for this age group, replicating the immense differential found in prior analysis”. They conclude that “excess risk to stepchildren cannot be attributed to reporting or detection biases, nor to incidental traits of persons who remarry, nor to differential poverty, duration of co-residency, maternal youth or family size. Step-parent-hood per se is the relevant risk factor . . . a relatively extreme consequence of the fact that genetic parents’ solicitude generally exceeds that of stepparents”.

This argument might well be dismissed by middle-class social commentators who have managed to create civilised extended families, based on a couple of marriages, each lasting 20 years or so, and cannot see what all the fuss is about. Their arrangements, however, are fundamentally monogamous and far removed from the domestic chaos and moral squalour financed and even encouraged by a mixture of the studiously nonjudgmental welfare state and what used to be called “the permissive society”.

The “family” that did for P is a classic of the genre. The mother had been on benefits for her entire adult life and apparently spent much of her days absorbed by pornographic dating websites. The so-called “stepfather” was also on benefits: the outlet for his otherwise unexpended energy was, as we now know, “training” – that is to say, torturing – his “stepson”. The other assailant, described rather euphemistically as “the lodger”, shared a room in the same council house with a 15-year-old girl.

When I asked a former child protection officer how Haringey’s social workers could have felt that it was in P’s best interests to remain in such a menagerie, he said that “you begin to become accustomed to these situations and you see children who accept such a state of affairs as absolutely normal”.

We need a new term for this human zoo: welcome to the wel-feral state.

dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk

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