After Megan Khung: Family, abuse and the reckoning around child safety

The case should prompt a deeper reflection on what we could have done better and the challenges in dealing with family abuse.

- Lin Suling

Bruising on the forehead, along her right chin line and under her left ear. Wounded lips.

Bruising on her right leg above the knee - two marks joined together, about 4cm or 5cm long.

Bruising on her left leg from the back of her knee to about halfway up her thigh. Two to three horizontal marks on that same thigh. Bruises on both feet.

These are half of the 16 injuries three-year-old Megan Khung displayed in March 2019, recounted by her preschool teacher in findings released last week by a panel reviewing how agencies handled her case.

Despite these visible wounds, Megan’s situation would continue to fly under the radar until her death almost a year later.

The grisly details of her abuse, inflicted by her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, had already sparked public outrage during court hearings. But reading the 42-page review report laying out multiple points of failure by social services and law enforcement, one cannot escape the heavy sense of collective failure.

How did we fail so badly to protect one of society’s most vulnerable members? And where did we drop the ball?

Those questions have no easy answers, especially when the warning signs appear obvious only in hindsight.

To play the blame game, trying to hunt down the name of a teacher, a social worker or a government officer who mucked it up, misses the vital point: A crime was committed, and the perpetrators caught and sentenced. Yet, if justice was served, why this palpable sense of grief and deep sorrow?

One reason is that the system had plentiful opportunities to act, yet failed at every turn. The panel findings were sobering: The six agencies involved in Megan’s case could each have made a sum difference to the life of a little girl.

If only her preschool teacher, who had seen the 16 injuries and was sufficiently alarmed to have taken a photograph, had said, “this is child abuse, not excessive parental discipline”.