It is three minutes after 10. You're listening to James O'Brien on LBC. As I speak, the judge in the case of 10-year-old Sarah Sharif will be commencing his summing up in court prior to handing down sentences in the next hour or two.

Rest assured, I'll bring that news to you as soon as it occurs.

But I want to return to some territory that we explored together, I think, late last week.

There are two things I took away from that phone in. I don't know how much of what we do stays with you after you've turned the radio off or moved on to do something less boring instead, as we

used to sing, to a certain television program

theme tune. But sometimes things stay with me. Two things stayed with me from the last

conversation we had. One was explicit and one was implicit. The explicit bit involved Peter

Connolly, or baby P, as he is more commonly remembered. And my memory, which I think was correct,

that what his mother had done to disguise evidence

of some of the abuse that little boy had suffered

was ensure that he had sort of chocolate spread

or peanut butter smeared around his mouth

when social workers called.

And that there was a certain alacrity in some of the

responses to suggest that this could easily have been dealt with. You could insist that the mother

could wipe the child's face. That's not necessarily true, would you believe. But it spoke to

the second, the implicit thing that I took away from that conversation,

which was the sense that we think it could be prevented. And I marry that to the

thought that emerged during the course of our conversations, because you remember cases from

long, long, long ago

that were comparable in their unpleasantness,

that there will always be cases like this,

...