THE immediate reaction to the report into the death of two-year-old Ainlee Labonte is "oh no, not again".

Once again we see our social services publicly lambasted after a poor tiny tot has died the most horrible of deaths, a death which could have been prevented if only the various agencies had worked together more effectively. Appalling mistakes have been made.

And so we welcome the 47 recommendations in yesterday's report. We agree with the NSPCC that the level of child killing in this country is "a national outrage". We agree that there probably should be some reform of our child protection system, and that there may be merit in a children's commissioner.

However, we are not going to join in what is fast becoming a national pastime: the beating up of social services once every couple of months.

After all, whenever there is a burglary we don't condemn the police for failing to prevent it; whenever there is a fire we don't condemn the firefighters for failing to prevent it; whenever a child fails an exam we don't condemn the teachers for failing to prevent it.

This doesn't mean that we accept or tolerate failure; it means we view it in an adult manner. It means we put it in the context of the tens of thousands of children who are well-protected - and possibly saved from deaths as painful as poor Ainlee's - by the existing system.

And it means we acknowledge the difficulty of the social services' job. They have to make a delicate judgement with, in this case, the physical threats of a very violent family hanging over them. When social workers do march in and snatch a child from its family - however dangerous that family may be - they are accused of breaking up a happy family and are sued for every penny. When they fail to march in and snatch a child, they are publicly torn to shreds - as we saw yesterday.

If we worry that prospective politicians will be put off standing for election because of the scrutiny of their private lives, we should also worry about social workers being put off because of the public dissection of their mistakes.

This does not mean that social services should not be publicly accountable. Nor does it mean that lessons should be ignored. But there must be some perspective.

And listening to yesterday's coverage castigating the catalogue of mistakes, it sounded as if social services had inflicted the 64 wounds upon Ainlee's body and killed her. But, it was her parents who murdered her, and her wider family who failed her most.

Ainlee's mother was abused as a child, ran away from foster care, was pregnant by the time she was 14, and had a violent, petty criminal record. Ainlee's father was violent with a criminal record and a drugs habit.

Social services should have done more to help her. But, in truth, the poor kid barely stood a chance, and while society continues to breed such hopeless cases we can't allow social services to forever be the scapegoat.