Cameras in addicts’ homes may save young lives

We know from research that many of these children are living in desperate circumstances, exposed every day to neglect, violence, drug abuse and other forms of petty and serious criminality. In the face of those numbers, we find ourselves waiting with bated breath for the next Caleb Ness or Derek Doran: the child who suffers fatally at the hands of an alcoholic or drug-addicted parent. And when that happens there will be the all too familiar clamour of voices criticising social work agencies for having failed to pick up what, in hindsight, looked like the clear signs of serious concern.

But why do social work staff fail to pick up those signs? The answer to that question lies in part in the sheer scale of the problem that they face. Given the number of children living with an addict or alcoholic parent, social work staff have to prioritise the worst cases. Prioritising is a way of trying to ration scarce resources when need outstrips supply. Triage or rationing or prioritising is the soft language of helping one child while turning away from another and, in the case of addict families, it is a high-risk strategy for the simple reason that these households can go from being relatively stable to dangerously chaotic in the blink of an eye.

Social work staff involved with addict and alcoholic families are operating in a shadowland trying "read off" the danger signs hidden behind the comforting reassurances of the parents and the silent glances of the children. Inevitably, there will be occasions when they get it wrong and a child is harmed, or killed.

The failure, though, may not be about people or procedures but about the very scale of the problem and the impossibility of social work staff truly knowing what is going on behind the closed doors of addict and alcoholic households.

But is there a way in which technology could help social workers in assessing the risks to children in addict and alcoholic families? Within the UK we have become used to the proliferation of CCTV cameras within public spaces. When a serious crime is committed, or an act of terrorism occurs, we take some comfort from the knowledge that the footage from those cameras will be studied to identify and apprehend the perpetrators.

We have also become used to the idea that those cameras are an effective means of crime prevention. What we have not considered, though, is their possible use in private spaces. Could those same cameras play a role in protecting vulnerable children? If, instead of basing their assessments of children's safety on interviews with the parents and their children, social work staff had access to CCTV footage of family life within addict and alcoholic family homes, they would have access to a greater level of understanding of the risks to the children involved.

The idea of placing a camera within an addict household will be seen as a violation of the principle of the privacy of family life enshrined within human rights legislation and the unacceptable extension of "Big Brother" (the household in which, for entertainment purposes, we have become used to the presence of a camera in every room).

However, if we cannot rely on children to have the courage to tell us what is going on within their homes, or the honesty of parents to reveal the details of how they may be harming their children, then perhaps we need to draw on the technology of CCTV surveillance to get a clearer picture of the lives of the children involved.

It would be reassuring if the solutions to our persistent social problems were ethically untroubling and unchallenging. But as we come to recognise the scale of the problem we face in meeting the needs of children in addict and alcoholic families, and the limited capacity of social work agencies to assess what is going on within those families, we may well need to look to new ways of assessing children's vulnerability and harm; CCTV may well play a role in those assessments, if not now then at some point in the future.

If, on the other hand, we say that placing a camera within an addict or alcoholic household is a step too far, then we should recognise that we are effectively telling social work staff that they can inquire within families so long as they do not violate the principle of family privacy. But if we place greater importance on the principle of family privacy over and above the protection of the children within addict and alcoholic homes, we can hardly criticise social work staff when they fail to identify which homes posed the greatest risk to the children involved.

• Neil McKeganey is Professor of Drug Misuse Research, Glasgow University.