Rebuttal: Duncan McNeil on child abuse

Full Story:
http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0337.htm
ONE SKILL at which we in Scotland truly excel is sweeping uncomfortable truths under the carpet. And it's not only us as individuals. Our national institutions aren't above turning a blind eye when they're frightened about what they might see.
Take the issue of drug abused children. Over the summer, Scottish government documents - dubbed, in what must pass for humour in the civil service, "letters of assurance" - were quietly made public. These revealed that not only are the authorities unaware of which children are living with drug addict parents, they haven't even counted them.
It was a stark illustration, as I said at the time, of just how low these shadow children are on the state's priorities list: not even a statistic.
What surprised me most, though, was that this information was just accepted with an uninterested shrug of the shoulders. Few seemed worried that systematic failings in our child protection system are leaving tens of thousands of at-risk children unidentified and unprotected.
There was, though, much anguish over last week's figures showing that nearly 2600 kids were placed on child protection registers last year. It's 2600 too many, of course, but it's only a shocking figure until you remember that there are about 21,000 addicts on methadone right now - a third of whom have kids. Even if we ignore all the addicts outwith the methadone programme and suppose they have an average of one-and-a-half kids each, that's 10,500 children. Or, put another way, nearly 8000 children who are forced to live in the danger and squalor of a drug addict household, but aren't on any register.
We need to face up to some hard truths about how the country we tell ourselves is compassionate and equitable treats its most vulnerable citizens.
In doing so, it will become apparent that serious problems require serious solutions.
It's not just about more money - although if frontline services can't protect the kids they know about now, why would they go out looking for more? But is it not also time to put the rights of drug abused children before the rights of their parents?
Why, for example, are we still subsidising drug dealers by giving their customers cash benefits? Is it not naive to think that an addicted mum's child benefit is spent feeding and clothing her baby? Is there an argument for providing certain benefits in kind? Or a mechanism whereby certain benefits, such as child benefit, would follow the child, rather than the mother?