Introduction

The state assumes that, because parents brought their children into the world, they will care for them and protect them from harm; indeed, it trusts them to do so. The vast majority of parents fulfil these state expectations conscientiously. They not only fulfil their children's right to protection, but bring them up in an atmosphere of love and security. Unfortunately, the children's liberationists' view of childhood as an oppressed state and parents as the chief oppressors, with the freedom to abuse their children in private, is not entirely ill-conceived. Some parents do exploit their privacy and their children's vulnerability to abuse. The Committee on the Rights of the Child has indicated its deep concern over the number of child deaths each week in the UK due to violence and neglect and, more generally, over the growing levels of child neglect.

The dilemma is that the degree of state surveillance and control necessary to prevent all ill-treatment would involve an unacceptable interference with the upbringing of many thousands of children, the majority of whom are perfectly well cared for by loving parents. This presents the law with the need to find a satisfactory compromise between an unwanted level of authoritarian state interference and a passive assumption that it is impossible to prevent a tiny minority of children suffering in the privacy of their homes.