Shock toll of child cruelty is ‘tip of the iceberg’

Campaigners have reacted with shock after it was revealed 16 prosecutions for child cruelty and neglect are brought every week.

A Sunday Post probe has revealed 7,454 abusers have been hauled before magistrates’ courts in England over the past nine years. But experts claim the prosecution rate which represents an average of 828 a year is just the tip of the iceberg and there are thousands more victims who will never be helped.

The revelations come just weeks after evil Amanda Hutton, 43, was given a 12-year jail term for the manslaughter of her four-year-old son Hamzah Khan. She was given a further three years for child cruelty.

The child’s emaciated body was found in the bedroom of Hutton’s squalid Bradford home two years after he died.

Last night, Claude Knights, director of charity Kidscape, said: “These are under-reported crimes due to the very young age and vulnerability of the victims. As a significant number don’t result in prosecutions they do not appear in the statistics.

“The horrendous child cruelty and gross neglect cases that have come to national attention in the last three weeks alone point to significant failures across many safeguarding agencies.”

She said recommendations which emerged from the Baby P scandal have still not been heeded, adding; “Statements such as ‘lessons will be learned’ and ‘this must not be allowed to happen again’ which are heard after every serious case review sound very hollow indeed.”

Children’s charity NSPCC also warned that the figures do not tell the full story. An NSPCC spokesperson said: “These figures do show a distressing level of crimes committed against often very young and helpless children, who may not understand what is happening and are unable to ask for help. We know from studies that this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.”

Nationally, the number of prosecutions decreased slightly over the last nine years with 828 in 2004 down to 797 in 2012. But across Lancashire, Cumbria, North Yorkshire and the North East the number of prosecutions showed an overall rise of 54 to reach a shocking total of 1,087.

In Cumbria there was an increase of 21 prosecutions, while Cleveland saw a rise of two, 34 in Lancashire and 17 in North Yorkshire. But in Northumbria they fell by 16 and dropped by four in Durham.

Last month Cumbrian mum Ewa Smolenska-Golawska, 42, was jailed for 27 months after admitting abandoning her two-year-old daughter on a Carlisle street. Magistrates in Carlisle heard Smolenska-Golawska, of Warwick Road, had been making her way home from a family gathering and began hammering on a stranger’s door, thinking it was her own. Realising her mistake, she left but was so drunk she forgot the child who remained in her pram at the front door in the perishing chill.

The Department for Education which leads on child protection, said: “There is nothing more important that protecting children from harm. Our statutory guidance makes it clear that if anyone has a concern about a child they should report this immediately to children’s social care.”

A Crown Prosectution Service spokesperson, said: “If anyone is concerned about the investigation and prosecution of child cruelty or neglect cases, they are welcome to raise the matter with the police and the CPS directly so that we can consider what action should be taken.”

THE distressing case of Hamzah Khan is just the latest in a sickeningly long list of high-profile child neglect and cruelty cases.

Last month a serious case review revealed chances were missed to save four-year-old Daniel Pelka who was murdered by his mum and her partner. The bright youngster who often arrived at school with bruises and facial injuries was starved and beaten for months before he died in March 2012 at their home in Coventry.

His warped mother Magdelena Luczak, 27, and her evil partner Mariusz Krezolek, 34, must serve a minimum of 30 years each for what the judge called their “incomprehensible brutality”.

Fury erupted last week when it emerged Tracey Connelly, 32, will be released after just six years of an indeterminate jail term for allowing her 17-month-old son Peter to be tortured to death. Baby Peter died on August 3, 2007, after suffering more than 50 injuries. Connelly was jailed with her boyfriend Steven Barker and his brother Jason Owen.

In 2003, a judge blasted the “blinding incompetence” of welfare agencies after eight-year-old Victoria Climbie was murdered. She died after being kept in a bath, beaten and fed scraps of food like a dog. Her aunt Marie Therese Kouao and partner Carl Manning were jailed for life.