Dead children always look so beautiful. Victoria Climbi's curls are held with yellow ties, and her smile is hopeful. Lauren Wright has blonde bunches caught in rosebud ribbons. The girls' school photos, shot in a rare instant of peace or pretence, bear no relationship to the reality of their lives. One child was left in a sack of excrement in a cold bath; the other was pulverised like steak on a butcher's slab and left to die. In the face of such incomprehensible brutality, the pictures tell a simpler horror story. A murderous great-aunt adjusted the yellow hair ties. A killer stepmother fixed the rosebud ribbons. The clash of normality and evil appals and also, in some curious way, absolves us. We are detached and at a loss to comprehend.  Such wickedness, we think, does not brush ordinary lives. It does now. The Climbi inquiry is a recital of blight and official blindness in the anonymous inner city. The case of Lauren Wright demonstrates how a peaceful Norfolk village, with a church, an ivy-clad pub and 300 inhabitants, can double as a torture chamber. Neighbours and teachers looked on as Lauren's weight fell and her bruises spread. Tracey Wright, a playground helper, felt sufficiently emboldened by communitarian spirit to brutalise her in public and encourage her own children to spit in their stepsister's face.   What sort of a woman commits such atrocities? Cruel, sadistic, not clever but very cunning. And familiar. The monstrous mother has existed since the time of Euripides and before. While Tracey Wright may not qualify as a modern   Medea, she is a recognisable figure in the canon of evil. Nor is there anything new in the modern continuum of child torture. Every week in Britain, at least one child dies at the hands of a parent or carer. As the NSPCC points out, the roll call of child killing has continued uninterrupted since Maria Colwell was murdered in the early 70s. For all the reforms and promises, we have made no impact at all.   But the culture that spawns viciousness evolves in terrifying ways. It seems unbelievable that those who watched Lauren suffer could shuffle their feet, like awkward spectators at a stranger's deathbed, as a child was inched towards her grave. It is unspeakable, too, that social services should lace their culpability with such cynicism. The official valediction to brief lives now contains two strands. First, supply extra money, or expect more deaths. The second message, whispered as the Climbi inquiry continues, is that professionals should not have their errors paraded, lest potential care workers shun this blighted system.   Such arguments brand at-risk children as economic bait. It is, however, true that the Government is so miserly on child protection that English authorities have overspent by 500 million this year, just to provide the thin back-up that allowed Lauren and Victoria's killings. Diverting money into favoured, and successful, Government initiatives, such as Sure Start, means less for basic services. Promises to eradicate child poverty, linked closely to neglect, sound hopeful, but 4.3 million British children remain poor. The Prime Minister lauds America, where the impoverished black child may aspire to high office. We shall see soon how the Colin Powell model will play out here.   Poverty is not the only issue. Nor is a pernicious minority of brutes who torture children the sole problem, though it is the least tractable. Michael Stone, the murderer of Lin and Megan Russell and a man no doubt immortalised some where in a sweet-faced school snapshot, was beaten by his stepfather at the age of one and abused by social workers. We understand how to create monsters. We do not know how to redeem them. Notions of parenting classes for the inadequate are little more than a sop for middle class do-gooders with the warm idea that cruelty is amenable to the intervention of a Dr Spockish government.   But the state is a dreadful parent. It is responsible for care home scandals. It presides,  in loco parentis, over the young offenders' institutions that, for all the warnings, still corrupt and kill. We weep, rightly, for murdered toddlers, but children discovered hanging in a Feltham cell die without public lament or remark. What binds such victims to each other, and to all those whose lives will never be corroded by cruelty, is absence of power.   Adults see children as their property. The law is cavalier. A child can be arrested and strip-searched at 10 but not interviewed by police until he or she is 14. Children can drink alcohol at five but not buy a pet kitten before the age of 12. It took until last year for the Home Office to issue guidance that child prostitutes were abuse victims, not criminals. A few weeks ago Scotland announced its plan to outlaw smacking for the under-threes. Westminster proposals are imminent, and child protection charities fear that a government that recently sanctioned smacking by childminders might restrict the ban to babies only.   Outlawing smacking altogether is imperative. Those who hesitated to report Tracey Wright as she went about the legalised business of battering her child might have thought again. Such a ban would also impact on parents, Blair and   Blunkett included, who see no great harm in a remedial swipe. It would symbolise a fairer world for children and end the idea that Article 12 of the Human Rights Convention is, like recorder lessons and broccoli, desirable but inessential.   A lack of rights for children drives society's failings. That absence feeds the confidence of torturers, the apathy of protectors and the vagueness of government reformers. It underpins the cruel practice of keeping children with their birth parents when all reason and humanity demands their removal. It genuflects to the madness of a system in which it is legal to assault a child but not a grown-up. It makes adults, the monstrous and the kind alike, complicit in neglect.   So, reform the child care system. Have a Children's Commissioner, as the NSPCC and others demand. But a slicker, more accountable structure will not be enough. We have the worst child poverty and infant mortality rates in Europe. A quarter of recorded rape victims are children. One in five children is mentally ill. Another child will be killed by a parent before this week is over. The charge sheet, if there ever is one, is likely to say manslaughter, not murder. The presumption is that the premeditated slaughter of a child is a lesser crime. What are the remedies against such horrors?   'We deserve to know why,' Lauren's MP said, as she demanded an inquiry into her death. But we do know why. And the lesson, not yet absorbed, of Victoria's and Lauren's deaths is that children, not adults, are the deserving ones. They need more rights, more legal protection, more compassion. They need more than old stereotypes of evil and of innocence. They need solutions to disaster that go beyond a tired litany of official regret laced with laments on overwork. They deserve better than a society that turns its back on the ugly fate of living children while weeping at the beauty of the dead.