Review: Protecting Our Children (2012, UK)

The BBC’s previous child protection documentary series focused on the police trying to detect and apprehend child abusers. This time, the programme makers follow a team of social workers and the general modern child protection structure starting in the home. Episode one showed us selected events over nearly a year in their attempt to help one family’s toddler to thrive out of delayed development and the eventual outcome. It would have been a better documentary if the entire family’s faces had been obscured and not just those of their children.

Hopefully the rest of the short series will drop the manipulative soap opera structure and more time will be given over to the actual work done by the social workers instead of the quick chats and Oprah-style summing up at the end.

You can view episode one on the BBC iPlayer here with a deadline date of 20th February.

– CBG