On one level, the extraordinary furore over Baby P's death is an understandable response to an appalling human tragedy. But in many respects, the social reaction and government response have become part of the problem rather than the solution.
The entire commentary on the case has been based on a key assumption - that it is possible for social work intervention to protect all children from abuse and, ultimately, death. Yet this idea is questionable and is in fact quite new. Understanding its origins can help us to set more realistic aims in child protection.
From the beginnings of child protection social work in the late-19th century through to 1914, no less than 13,613 children died in child protection cases. These were children who died in the cases that the NSPCC knew about. Like today, many more died from abuse but did not come to the attention of professionals. Not all of these children were killed by murderous cruel parents. Many were dying anyway due to poverty, rampant diseases and poor public health.
Far from keeping the deaths of children in the cases it worked with hidden, like they are today, the NSPCC used to routinely publish statistics on them to show the success of its work, to prove "that it is telling on the lives of children". It only stopped doing this in the 1930s - not because such deaths had been successfully ended, but because they had to be covered up as a means of boosting public confidence in child protection work.
In the process, the central ideology of modern child protection took shape: the belief that children could and should be protected. Ideas about childhood had changed and the public no longer had the stomach for knowing that children were being failed by child protection agencies.
Yet up to at least the 1950s, the average child protection worker could still expect to have one child death every year in their cases, even though these deaths now remained hidden from public view. The handling of the issue began to change in the 1970s when the public inquiry into the death of Maria Colwell, beaten to death by her stepfather, effectively blamed the professional system for her death, and such failures became a shameful thing. Ironically, at a time when further improvements in practice meant that deaths in child protection work became a rare event, managing the risk of system failure, rather than learning from and celebrating success, became the defining approach.
The central paradox of modern child protection is that the better social workers have become at protecting children and preventing their deaths, the more bitter the public and political outcry has become when this fails to happen.
The painful truth is that detecting human cruelty is deeply disturbing, emotional work where there will always be human error. The extent to which we are prepared to face up to that and provide social workers with the training, resources, support and compassion they need to perform this work will determine how well they are able to protect children as far as is humanly possible.
• Harry Ferguson, professor of social work at Nottingham University, is author of Protecting Children in Time