I am grateful to Danny Lang for providing a reading list to help me in struggling to cope with my role as a GP in child protection.1 I suspect that his safeguarding colleague Janice Allister would suggest more robust measures of support to help me to overcome what she regards as my ‘cynical denial of what is a very real problem’.2 Both Dr Lang's readings and Dr Allister's exhortations confirm the very real problems I sought to highlight in the column that has so upset them: the presumption that the box-ticking bureaucracy currently dominating child protection in general practice is effective in preventing abuse or neglect, and the apparent indifference of the safeguarding zealots to the adverse consequences of further medical intrusion in intimate relationships.3
I do …