IT IS with both utter revulsion and intense anger that people will react to the Waterhouse Report into Britain's worst-ever scandal centred on 40 child-care homes in North Wales. For what happened was sheer evil on an horrendous scale.

Some 650 young people were repeatedly raped, sexually abused and beaten by staff and strangers over two decades.

At least a dozen victims committed suicide.

Yet, if the three-year inquiry by Sir Roland Waterhouse into this nightmare lays bare its appalling, sickening nature and magnitude, what is perhaps even more shocking is the disclosure that so much of it was avoidable.

No matter how much was due to complacency or inefficiency on the part of social workers, local authorities and police when complaints were made, more chilling is the conclusion that the alarm cries were deliberately brushed aside or even resented.

When social worker Alison Taylor first lifted the lid off this vile set-up in 1986 as she told police, council officials and social services superintendents of the complaints of horrific abuse reported to her by children arriving from other care homes, she was not only ignored, she was branded as "subversive" and sacked.

It was another four years before anyone eventually took notice of what she persisted in saying.

And all the time these evil paedophiles were preying on their young victims and enjoying the protection afforded by their own collusion and by the failure of the alerted authorities to act.

So we have scandal heaped upon scandal and terrible tragedy multiplied as a result - and even now many of the monsters responsible for these crimes are still at large, perhaps even working with children.

But, surely, it is not just they who must be caught and punished along with those who already have been.

Where is the justice until all, including the lackadaisical police and other officials, who permitted this horror to continue are also held fully to account?

Where, too, will be the justice if ever a scandal like this is allowed to occur again on the slightest scale?

The Waterhouse Report makes 72 recommendations designed to ensure no repetition.

It calls upon councils, social services, police and government to make sweeping changes.

All should be instantly implemented.

But, surely, the prime requirement throughout the child-care system must be the learning of the lesson that every complaint of abuse, however slight or seemingly absurd, must be listened to, recorded and immediately and diligently acted upon.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.