Is the Baby P case a reflection of 'Broken Britain'?

Yesterday the names of the three people held responsible for allowing the death of Baby P (now known as Peter Connelly), were finally revealed.

We now know that Tracey Connelly, 28, her partner Steven Barker, 33, and his brother Jason Owen, 37, were responsible for causing Peter's death. We also know that Barker was convicted for the rape of a two year old girl.

We were led to believe that their identities were kept secret to protect Connelly's other children, but also to avoid prejudicing other active cases, so why have their identities been revealed now?

Children at risk

Surely Connelly's children will be at risk from being identified, and with their mother only receiving a five year sentence she may well be out in half that time. This presumably means that she will have to be given a new identity upon her release from jail.

If this does not happen then the risk of vigilante attacks is high, and so too the risk to her children's well-being. However, if Tracey Connelly does recieve this level of protection, then it is also likely that both Barker and Owen will too.

The problem here is that this level of protection is very expensive, and the public reaction to the government spending money on convicted criminals is not favourable at all. So the question must be posed why chose to identify those involved?

Why identify?

If it is because the public have a right to know who committed the crime then fine, but if this is the case then they should not be given new identities upon release. This is a massive waste of money, and if their identities had been concealed forever, this expense could have been avoided all-together.

In these kinds of cases there is always the temptation to paint someone like Tracey Connelly as a victim of sorts. We now know that she suffered abuse as a child and had a pretty awful upbringing, but this does not mean that what happened to baby Peter was inevitable.

If this were true then there would be many more child deaths resulting from abuse, but it just isn't. Too often teams of social workers are attached to those who have committed crimes, and they are given the option to blame what they did as adults on what happened to them as children.

'Broken Britain'

More often than not this gives people the easy way out, and this has to change. Politicians talk about 'Broken Britain', but attaching these labels to areas of society is not helpful at all.

It is as if a generation of people have been condemned to repeat the cycle of poverty, unemployment, abuse or any other detrimental cycle you can name, and there is nothing we can do about it.

Well this is patently not true. If politicians tell people that Britain is broken, people will believe it and stay resigned to their likely fates. However, if politicians begin to engage with poorer communities instead of chasing so called 'floating voters', we may just make some progress.

Communities abandoned

To take an example, in South Yorkshire Barnsley has been forgotten by the traditional political parties and people are looking for answers. This led them to elect a BNP candidate to the Euopean Parliament.

If the main-stream parties re-engage with voters here and show an interest in their needs, then this will change but it needs to happen fast, otherwise 'Broken Britain' will become a widespread reality of the politicians' own making.

The sad case of baby Peter Connelly, will I am sure be used to highlight what is wrong with today's society, but his death should not be exploited in this way. It is disrespectful to his life and just plain wrong.

What the case does show is what happens to someone when they are neglected. There is still time to help people in these situations and the so-called cycle of abuse is never inevitable, however much some people would have us believe that it is.