This piece was forwarded to BLOGDIAL by a lurker. Its contents are simply shocking:

I raised the alarm about family 15 years ago. I still want answers

Eileen Fairweather

Every time I have seen Lord Laming, the Government's favourite child protection “expert”, wheeled out since Baby Peter's death I have gritted my teeth.

Never once has he admitted he knew the truth about this poor child's family.

Fifteen years ago, I warned Lord Laming in writing that a young relative of Baby Peter was central to a vicious London paedophile ring.

This followed one of the most disturbing and revealing inquiries ever mounted by the Evening Standard.

But Lord Laming — then chief inspector of social services — did nothing effective to rescue this terrified boy.

Since then, Lord Laming has presided over the destruction of tried and tested child protection systems, so more children than ever are at risk. He has also helped create today's surveillance society, which allows government apparatchiks and paedophiles alike to spy on innocent families.

In the early Nineties, Baby Peter's mother and a relative were under Islington council's care. Shockingly, all of its 12 children's homes then contained pimps, paedophiles and pornographers, who openly abused children. Decent staff who protested were threatened or sacked. In desperation, some bravely contacted this newspaper.

Baby Peter's relative, we were repeatedly told, was under particular pressure to introduce children to outside pimps. But the authorities thought it more important to protect politicians.

The then-council leader Margaret Hodge labelled the newspaper's meticulously-sourced investigation as “sensationalist gutter journalism”.

Laming, who later worked for Hodge, responded by letting Islington investigate itself. Inevitably, its inquiries were a whitewash.

So I and a Standard colleague met Lord Laming and revealed that management had “lost” incriminating files requested by police investigating three separate child sex rings. Islington's assistant director resigned a few days later “for personal reasons”.

But still no real inquiry ensued.

Hence the Standard's decision to compile a 112-page dossier of further evidence. I submitted it with real if naïve hope and Laming, to his credit, ordered a secret inquiry into Baby Peter's relative. It confirmed in August 1994 that Islington knew for two years that he was at the heart of grave concerns about pimps preying on children's homes. The council and local police had done nothing save call meetings about meetings.

A broader independent inquiry in 1995 demanded that 26 former Islington staff, given glowing references following serious allegations of rape, kidnap and pimping, be barred from social work. Still no paedophiles were raided or charged, and no children interviewed or rescued.

Social services is the lead agency in child protection inquiries, so Laming had the power to call for police action.

None followed. Thus Hodge was able to boast that no one was convicted as a result of the scandal, and no evidence was found of a ring. The ring dispersed but continued hurting children.

Three protected Islington children's home heads moved to Thailand's notorious Pattaya child sex resort. Thai police charged Nick Rabet there in 2006 with abusing 30 local children, as young as six.

The Islington cover-up had, Thai police estimated, allowed him to hurt hundreds more children. Everyone who failed the children of London rose spectacularly higher.

Sue Akers, the detective inspector then in charge of Islington's Child Protection Team, is now a Deputy Assistant Commissioner.

Hodge, infamously, became Britain's first children's minister.

Herbert Laming was awarded ermine and undertook the inquiry into Victoria Climbie's murder, whose 2003 recommendations allowed Hodge to treat all parents as potential abusers.

Her subsequent Every Child Matters (ECM) “reform” of social services abolished the Child Protection Register, and replaced it with the controversial ContactPoint database on all Britain's 11 million children.

The few children at grave risk are now almost invisible, while social workers drown under a tidal wave of paperwork about ordinary families. ECM also effectively removed police from investigating child abuse — Laming suggested in his Climbie report that the police only investigate actual crime, not a child's feared risk of harm.

The police responded by closing most child protection teams.

Baby Peter's mother was once a victim too, and became an abuser in turn, through the well-documented “cycle of abuse”.

So why did no one in power ever do anything effective to stop the evil ring which ultimately destroyed her and Baby Peter?

I asked Lord Laming recently but he would not comment.

Eileen Fairweather is a former Standard reporter involved in an award-winning investigation into Islington care homes

[…]

Evening Standard

This confirms many of the things we have been saying about ContactPoint:

• The people who organized it are dangerously incompetent.
• It will hurt children, and not help them.
• If you want to keep a register of children, you only list those at risk, and not every child.
• ContactPoint is a dream come true for paedophiles.
• ContactPoint will make ordinary people into suspects.

It is clear, in the light of this information, that ContactPoint should never have been developed, and that Lord Lamming, Margaret Hodge and everyone involved in this scandal should have been permanently barred from having anything to do with the welfare of children.

I wonder if this evidence, had it been presented during the consultations on ContactPoint, would have made a difference. I expect not. What is more clear than ever is that ContactPoint is flawed, not only in the technical sense, which is irremediable, but in its inception. The people who were behind its creation were scandal ridden molestation enablers. That people of that background should be able to commission and create a system like ContactPoint (and Every Child Matters) is a prime example of what is wrong with Britain. Monsters, literally, are in charge and enabling the worst sort of criminals to carry out their crimes.

If you were not scared by ContactPoint, this should be enough to utterly terrify you. If you are not scared by it, you are INSANE. The children listed in ContactPoint are going to be viewable by over ONE MILLION PEOPLE. It cannot ever be secured. Anyone using the system can take a screenshot from the database, and then send it anywhere they like. Once the data is out, it is out forever, and since there are over a million people using the system at once, this means that all it will take for the entire database to be copied is for every user of contact point to make 11 screenshots each (11 million children being divided by one million users). The shortest time this could happen in is less than a day. It will happen. Even if ‘only’ half of the children’s records are copied, or one 100th of them are copied, the crime is still the same. It is totally immoral, socially corrosive and evil to create a system like this; there is no excuse for it, and that it comes from the minds of monsters like Lord Lamming and Margaret Hodge is no surprise whatsoever.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 10:04 am and is filed under Astonishing, Home Schooling, NIR, Politricks, Privacy, Someone Clever Said, Told You So.