I BELIEVE Professor Andy Bilson has interpreted Scottish child protection statistics in a way that is unsustainable and potentially dangerous for vulnerable children (Sunday National, May 2). Where he wants fewer child protection investigations, I would argue for many more.

His detailed research, into how such investigations have grown by a third over five years, leads him to question the justification for most of them. This is because almost three-quarters did not place a child on the child protection register. The number on this register at any one time has fallen from 2668 in 2017 to 2580 in 2020.

“What this means is that more families have been put through the pain and humiliation of being accused of harming a child, without increasing the number of children found to be harmed. This represents bad and ineffective social work practice,” he says.

I agree with Professor Bilson that rates of child protection investigation which varied almost tenfold among Scottish local authorities mean families face “justice by geography”. The reasons for such disparities need thorough investigation.

However, on Andy Bilson’s claims:

- Various actions are taken after a child protection investigation, other than putting children on the Register. They don’t always involve formal child protection measures. Regular reviews, involving families and statutory and third sector partners can provide continuing oversight. We don’t know from the bald statistics how often alternative action has been put in place, nor what kinds of action.

- At times he seems to equate action with removing a child from home, something he particularly opposes. But nowadays this is an uncommon outcome of a child protection investigation.

- Where no action was taken, it could equally be that investigations were not done thoroughly enough nor with best evidence. So that perhaps children in real need of protection have not received it. How do we actually know, from the bald statistics, which interpretation is correct?

- His interpretations are necessarily coloured by his longstanding theoretical position on statutory intervention, on “the overemphasis and exaggeration of risk in the child protection system and increasing separation of children from parents through adoption and care”, and by his work with the International Parent Advocacy Network.

As assistant social work Director in Fife under Allan Bowman, Bilson was a leading architect of its child-care policy which brought great controversy, social workers’ claims that their written reports were changed, and a major inquiry report by Sheriff Kearney in 1992. Kearney said the policy was not good child-care practice but a “radical and controversial programme aimed at the pursuit of the doctrinaire end of reducing at almost any cost the number of children in care. …we are satisfied there was a strong atmosphere inimical to the possibility of compulsory measures of care being imposed.”

Lord Fraser, Minister of State told Parliament the rigid and dogmatic manner of Fife’s central policy “alienated others involved in child care”, including the Children’s Panel, the Reporter, teachers, educational psychologists, child psychiatrists and health visitors.

I would argue that the main problem about child protection investigations and registrations lies in their evidence-gathering weaknesses and their priorities for concern. These appear far more about changing fashions and professional fears than about actual increases or decreases in types of harm to children.

The worryingly vague, amorphous “emotional abuse” (a critical description Andy Bilson and I would agree on) has been most prominent, along with neglect. In contrast, as a proportion of concerns raised, child sexual abuse (CSA) has dropped like a stone since the 1990s to the consternation of all who work against a crime with distressing mental and physical health consequences in later life. CSA, as a proportion of concerns to the register and child protection case conferences, has reduced to below 5%, with fewer than 300 children annually across Scotland now so identified.

Yet the most conservative estimates of CSA prevalence (one in 20 children) mean that if e.g. we added the under-16 populations of Dundee and Aberdeen, more than 3000 children from those cities alone would have suffered, or be suffering, CSA. Prevalence of one in 10 would double that.

Intense pressures on child protection staff after the English “Baby P” scandal, and careless use of modern neuroscientific findings, have meant most child protection now focuses on under-5s or even pre-birth, with its implicit mother-blaming. This pre-5 emphasis militates against detection of sexual abuse in the over-fives, where most CSA – largely by males – occurs.

We do need an urgent national review of Scottish child protection investigations. But this needs to scrutinise the current priorities for undertaking them, the reasons for sharp decline in other priorities, and failure to develop rigorous, imaginative, child-centred, perpetrator-focused evidence-gathering about harm to children.

Particularly in CSA we need far more skilled multi-disciplinary investigations, which draw for instance on the successful work evolving across Scotland and the UK - with police, social work and agencies like Barnardos - to detect child sexual exploitation amongst teenagers. The most vulnerable of whom are often those who (like those chaotic young mothers) were left unprotected by anyone from sexual abuse as children.

Dr Sarah Nelson OBE, Research specialist on childhood sexual abuse