All victims needed was one brave worker
If you've had a normal, happy childhood, it's nigh on impossible to comprehend the horrendous lives some children have to endure.
That's why we so often fail to see what is going on. In the house next door. Across the street. Sometimes right under our noses, in our own homes.
We've never been neglected, ruled by fear, battered or abused by an adult who is supposed to be our protector.
And so we fail to spot the signs when it is happening to someone else.
But police, social workers, teachers, doctors and nurses - they are given the training to look for the clues, piece together the evidence and then call on the powers that be to act swiftly to protect the child in need.
Over 100 in the so-called caring professions failed the two daughters of the monstrous father dubbed the Sheffield Fritzl. Some of them had suspicions, but over a 30-year period, not one took them any further than that.
And because the blame is shared between so many, no one is to be blamed or punished.
That is the pathetically tragic verdict of an inquiry into how one vile, perverted father got away with subjecting his daughters to a lifetime of sexual abuse. They were raped over 1,000 times and made pregnant by him 18 times. Their other siblings, it has emerged, were subjected to bullying and beatings.
The report concluded professionals had been "paralysed into a collective helplessness" and were either so afraid of the father, or so terrified they were jumping to the wrong conclusion, they "lost sight of the children".
If someone had been brave enough to stand by their suspicions, the girls could have been taken to a safe new life, and their father would have been serving his life sentence in jail much sooner.
It wouldn't have taken much to gather the most damning of evidence against him; nine babies died of a genetic disorder which could only occur when both parents were carriers of the same abnormality. Tests could have proved who the father was.
When no-one did anything, he must have felt invincible; his daughters, simply invisible.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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