The emotional outpourings of grief and anger at the case of Baby P (as evinced on this Lib Dem Voice thread for example - h/t Alix too!) are to be expected. It is truly a galling case with a litany of failures on the part of those supposed to protect the vulnerable and unutterable cruelty by those who should have been closest to the child.

This was to have been a rant that leaving things up to "the authorities" is a recipe for disaster. I was going to say that these sort of incidents are mercifully rare. So I looked around for some statistics (a PDF file) to back up my assertion and I found that, whilst we are still talking about small numbers (child homicides have hovered between about 60 and 100 a year for a long time)what is clear is that there *ought* to be a story like Baby P's every month or so somewhere. There is, it would appear, about one death a month of a child under one by its parents under the category of "acts of cruelty" (as opposed, I suppose, to whole family suicide incidents or throwing them off an hotel balcony). There's about one other of a child between one and four, again by parents, and about half as much again over all a month by strangers or less closely related family.

So, the big question for me out of this now becomes less "what happened to Baby P", so much as "why don't we have this horrific outrage a couple of times a month?" Of course the fact Baby P had been seen more than sixty times makes the failure all the greater, and it may be that these other couple of dozen cases a year are completely below the radar of the relevant child protection agencies.

But that on its own begs the question "why"? Even if they are not known to local authorities, these deaths represent a failure of the system simply because they have never come to anyone's attention before it's too late. A failure just as egregious as that of Haringey. Perhaps more so - for we know that people go to all sorts of lengths to conceal the sickest secrets - just think of Joseph Fritzl, as if you could forget.

So, is Haringey a victim of its own previous failings - making a death under their watch a more significant failing? Or is the real symptom of systemic failure the fact that this sort of thing is not all over the media twice a month elsewhere?