The Guardian view on failures to protect children: the buck stops where? | Editorial
Parents are not the only ones responsible for their children. Our social responsibility is at its greatest when parents are unable to protect their families - or, worse, are the threat. The murders of two young children in Northamptonshire, within five months of each other, is a brutal reminder that those duties are not always met. In both cases, according to the serious case reviews, children's social care and services including health and police failed to act on risks that were known to them.
The primary question is what is being done to ensure that such catastrophic errors are not repeated. A related one is who will take responsibility for what happened in December 2017, when two-year-old Dylan Tiffin-Brown died of heart failure after an assault by his father, and April 2018, when one-year-old Evelyn-Rose Muggleton was viciously beaten by her mother's partner. Both children's killers have been convicted of murder and are serving life sentences.
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