This will be a difficult post to express correctly, and I don't imagine it will be popular. I want to decry the manner of the disclosure of the identity of the killers of Baby P. Their names and detailed histories were all over the media yesterday. I watch C4 news after work, and even there we were taken through their background in what I found to be a prurient level of detail; much to the delight of Lynne Featherstone MP, even as she struggled to explain quite what benefit for anyone was being delivered by the disclosure.
I learned nothing about how to improve social services that wasn't obvious from the original reporting of the case. We did learn that Baby P's mother had had a dysfunctional upbringing, spent time in a care home as a result of her unimaginably vile home-life, that later she repeatedly became pregnant, was a drug abuser and so on. I don't think that knowing her name made the relevant sociological theory (that this form of background and behaviour can lead to a failure of love with regard to parenting, in this case a failure of such inhumane proportions that it sickens us to read about it) any more or less tenable. And what, anyway, does Lynne Featherstone MP plan to do with this information? Will she introduce a private member's bill to make it illegal for women to have children if they were placed in care themselves, as children? No, of course not. The important verb in the last-but-four sentence is 'can'. Not 'does', but 'can'. Knowing the specifics of one case tells us nothing that isn't already blindingly obvious for the general framework of policy.
In fact there are only two likely outcomes following from yesterday's information. One is that, should Baby P's killers ever be released from prison, we will have to invent and maintain fictional identities for the rest of their lives, and that well-meaning probation officers will spend energy on this at the expense of more deserving cases. (It's hard to imagine such a release, of course, but I speak of what must happen if it ever comes to pass).
The second potential outcome is worse. Baby P's mother has, I think, three other children. Now the identities of those blameless offspring will have to be altered and their lives spent on constant alert lest anyone learn of their infancy. I'm sure the same media which believes we have a right to know the name of their mother will not wait long, once their adolescence commences, to determine that we also have a right to know their names, living arrangements, partners and so on. The thought of this depresses me. To put it mildly. Lives which were already going to be unimaginably difficult have just had their problems exponentially exacerbated.
A few months ago I wrote on what might appear at first glance to be completely unrelated matter: the revelation in The Times of police-officer blogger Nightjack's real identity. I said then that there is surely a distinction between that which is legally permitted (for the newspaper to determine the name of the blogger), and that which it is ethical to do (for the newspaper to splash the man's name all over the media). Something similar has gone wrong here, I believe. No-one would argue that only the state should ever be aware of the identity of the perpetrators of this most wicked of crimes. But there's a gap, isn't there, between that statement being true, and the acres and acres of information released to the media yesterday. There is a right to know is not the same thing as Everyone must know.
Let me apologise for not having a firm resolution here to offer, something to cohere with my belief in the need for a transparent bureaucracy, and Richard Shepherd-levels of freedom of information. I fully accept that I may be wrong; the emotions of horror, and pity, and helplessness which this case engenders are quite debilitating. Sometimes, though, real people (blameless infants in this case) can be negatively impacted by the rote application of a principle whose application, most of the time, has only beneficial outcomes. I cannot see the outcome for these children, in this case, to be beneficial. And I believe that the interest of the most-affected human beings should trump any abstract principle. If they don't, we're left only with political algorithms, with the politics of a machine.