As the health visitor headed off from the flat, a little girl known only as Child A banged her hands against the window, shrieking for the grown-up not to leave. Her shouts and the thud of tiny fists on the glass were, in the files, rationalised as evidence of her “challenging” and “streetwise” behaviour, “rather than a serious indicator of distress”.

On another occasion, the girl tried to stop the school nurse from driving away after she had visited the house. She didn’t want to be left at home, a place that would later be called the “Beastie House” – inside of which the girl and her three siblings were subjected to years of rape, gang rape, assault, and drug-fuelled abuse while Glasgow’s multiple agencies repeatedly convinced themselves the parents were “warm” and “doing their best”.

The girl had written a note at school saying, “I hate myself”, and had previously said she wanted to kill herself. Child B, her little brother, asked staff to smell his trousers “because other children said he was smelling of poo”. Third sector services described the children as having “blackened and decayed teeth” and “smelling of urine” or “unwashed clothes”. But education and health records watered down the descriptions, instead documenting the children as “malodorous” or having “dental caries”. School and health staff said they did this because they lacked confidence about “using language that the family would object to”.

The city’s so-called safety net missed multiple opportunities over more than a decade when agencies could have intervened, with dozens of distinct risk factors documented before the children were removed from the “Beastie House”. A 75-page Learning Review Report into the case of Family C, published last week, is a heart-wrenching, extreme account of not only abuse but also how siloed governance and poor management can have devastating consequences.

Perhaps the most chilling revelation of the review is that professionals saw the children constantly and still managed to look past the neglect in front of them. The report states........

© Herald Scotland