Hannah was raped by her father at 10. Her mother, also a victim of abuse, fails to protect her. As a 12-year-old, Hannah was being prostituted by a pimp, who forced her into providing sex for as many as 20 men in a day. Her school permanently excluded her. Unsafe at home, she moved from paedophile to paedophile. She raised the alarm, but became too scared to testify. Her withdrawal led to her being labelled a "liar", and social services closed the case. She is still just 14.
Each of Hannah's experiences would generate an inquiry and media debate. A whole industry of opinion-espousers regurgitate aspects of her life and spit them out in documents that gather dust in filing cabinets. I believe Hannah is just one of about two million children in Britain today who endure chronic neglect and maltreatment. Everyone talks about them; few reach out to them.
We are a country proud to host the Olympics. We have cutting-edge cancer medicine, and a system of civil service which is the envy of the world. Yet we are also a nation catastrophically failing our vulnerable children. We are bottom of the league of the 21 wealthiest countries in the world for the wellbeing of children. Poor children are given free school meals, yet during the holidays, when schools are closed, we provide no alternative. We are the nation that has some 1.5 million children with special educational needs and no help, yet we claim we want the best education for our kids. We are the nation whose social work departments make unforgiving decisions, choosing between a child who has been sexually abused and one who has no food to eat. We do all this claiming lack of resources, yet we don't even know how much our interventions cost delivered to an individual child, because we haven't generated the systems to capture expenditure or efficacy in services.
Nationally we comfort ourselves with inquiries, almost as if writing and debating a document solves the problem. Most recently the Prince's Trust produced a piece of research illustrating that large numbers of children are going hungry. The truth is – as important as these inquiries are – all of them are pretty much describing the same set of children and families. Some charities pick up the extreme cases; others attempt to strengthen vulnerable individuals. In reality disparate inquiries are, in effect, describing the same set of clients with complex needs who happen to have multiple problems from addictions to lack of food to school failure to health issues. What they need is a holistic approach rather than agencies cherry picking their difficulties for discussion.
Maybe it's not lack of money or expertise, paralysing our ability to protect the vulnerable. I believe the problem resides in lack of belief. It's just that repeated prime ministers haven't known what it feels like to lie in terror on your bed, wondering what harm you'll have to endure today, or to be so hungry that the acid in your stomach feels like it's boring a hole through your flesh. They haven't felt the shame that peels away layers of your self-esteem, exposing jarring insignificance in the face of those who have the goods and the power. They haven't been there, where out of sheer fright and desperation you get on your hands and knees and beg not to be shot, or burned with a cigarette lighter, because you've failed to deliver a stash of drugs between dealers. In bed at night, between clean, soft sheets they contemplate, as a child is entangled in night terrors and wakes up to the humiliation of having wet the bed again. It's the lack of proximity to the abused child that is generating institutional maltreatment.
No more inquiries with sanitised statistics and airbrushed conclusions, which demand little and conceal much. Let the prime minister have faith, even if he can't access belief. Why not have a royal commission, looking at the life chances of vulnerable kids, and generating a national vision, which all political parties sign up to and deliver? Free up the practitioners to reveal the unacceptable compromises that betray them and our kids, devastating both. The abused child forgives, and hopes. Let's honour their hope. The vulnerable children of this country are living their abuse every day. I just want you to imagine it.