The Story of ‘Cinderella’

Abstract

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. 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: 69). Other accounts of Colwell (see, for example, Howells, 1974; London Borough of Brent, 1985; Merrick, 1996) make similar or even larger claims.