Introduction

The Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Care and Supervision Provided in Relation to Maria Colwell was submitted to Barbara Castle, the Labour Secretary of State for Social Services, in May 1974 (Colwell Report, 1974). It was published on 5 September, at first only on a limited scale and in typescript form due to a strike (a contemporary characteristic) by printers at Her Majesty's Stationery Office. The Inquiry had been chaired by Thomas Field-Fisher, a judge, assisted by Olive Stevenson, a social work academic and Margaret Davey, a local authority councillor. It is a relatively short report containing 120 pages, including appendices, amounting to little more than 60,000 words. But it would be difficult to exaggerate the symbolic significance that this rather modest and much-delayed document was to achieve in succeeding years. According to Parton (1985), for example, it was through the case of Maria Colwell that child abuse, previously experienced by professionals as “marginal to their everyday practice” and largely unattended to by the media and the general public, became established as a “major social problem” (Parton, 1985, p 69). Other accounts of Colwell (see, for example, Howells, 1974; London Borough of Brent, 1985; Merrick, 1996) make similar or even larger claims.

The emblematic nature of welfare scandals is an important theme of this book and it is clearly the case that the discursive consequences of Colwell extend well beyond the circumstances of one little girl's death at the hands of her carers. It is the purpose of this chapter, however, to recover some of the finer detail and contemporary significance of Colwell as a reminder that welfare scandals, whatever their subsequent fate, are founded on very particular events, inhabited by all too real people, and that the Public Inquiries that sometimes follow are very much products of their own time and place.

The events

Maria was born in Hove, near Brighton, East Sussex on 25 March 1965. She was the fifth and youngest child of her mother Pauline Tester's marriage to Raymond Colwell. Within weeks of Maria's birth, her father had left home in circumstances that were complex, acrimonious and involved a large extended family network. Shortly after, and before Maria was quite four months old, he died of natural causes.