Jayne Dowle: For the sake of all the other Shannons, we must never, ever, look the other way

It was bad enough that Shannon Matthews had already been placed on the child protection register, for a year, until social workers decided that her mother had had enough "intensive" help to manage.

But out of all the shocking facts to emerge from the heartbreaking case of the nine-year-old girl from Dewsbury Moor – abducted, hidden and drugged by her own family for a potential cash reward – is the one that should strike fear into the hearts of all decent people. The report into her disappearance describes the parenting provided by Shannon's mother Karen, as "pretty common".

Thousands of children in Britain – Dr Carole Smith, the report's author, put the figure at 304,000 – have been identified as "in need of services". And the truly frightening thing is that many of these children are living in homes where the neglect and abuse they suffer is described as "low-level".

This means that nothing serious enough is happening to give social services the authority to remove them and place them in care. They are just neglected, unloved, shoved from pillar to post, and living in constant fear of falling over the edge. Imagine, as you put your children to bed tonight in their safe, warm, clean rooms, what it must feel like to be a child living like that?

And the really, really awful thing is that I see children like this every day. We all do. It is just that some of us choose to notice, and some of us choose to look the other way. I watch these children being dragged along the road to school, when their parents can be bothered to get out of bed to take them, in torn clothes, with smeared faces and exhausted eyes.

I see them being sworn at, in words you wouldn't use to an animal, in the supermarket.

I see them wandering the streets alone at night, long after the street-lamps have come on. And I wonder, always, should I say something?

It is a huge dilemma. My friend's nine-year-old daughter has befriended a child in her class who is so obviously vulnerable. She has at least four siblings, her mother has probably had as many partners in the few short years the children have been pals. The child's clothes are dirty, she is thin, pale, withdrawn. She smells. I saw the family in the corner shop the other day. Her mother was screaming a volley of four-letter abuse at one of her toddlers. The shop assistant shrugged her shoulders at me, and muttered: "Well, what can you do?"

Indeed, what would you do? My friend is torn; should she voice her concerns, or should she keep her mouth shut? If she said anything to the mother, it could endanger the children's friendship and isolate the little girl further.

And who else would actually listen and take action? At least 22 agencies were monitoring the Matthews family, and none were found culpable in what happened to Shannon. Karen Matthews had been assessed and judged capable of meeting her children's "basic needs". There was no evidence to suggest that removing Shannon from the family home was warranted. Neighbours admit that they were concerned about Shannon and her siblings.

But, as one local woman pointed out in the recent news coverage, there was nothing so unusual about the Matthews family and the way that they lived.

Don't you find it absolutely appalling that this kind of life has become an accepted state of affairs? And don't you find it deeply disturbing to wonder at what point how many of those children, living in "low-level" risk, might become the next Baby P, the next Shannon Matthews?

The Labour government made many grand pledges to reduce the number of children living in poverty. It largely failed. And you can't measure poverty on a purely economic scale. What we are looking at here is not only poor parenting, but poverty of parenting. The kind of parenting where the wants and compulsions of the parents come way above those of any children, where babies are born into this world simply to increase the amount of child benefit coming into the house, which will go straight out again to the off-licence and the drug-dealer and the online porn sites.

Concerned neighbours can shout up, but it won't make much difference. Social workers can intervene, but these parents are adept at making excuses.

They know all the answers to give, as we have seen time and time again when a tragic child has died while the authorities appeared not to register the broken ribs and the fractured skulls. For the sake of all the other Shannon Matthews out there, I wish I had the answer. I can only urge the people charged with protecting those thousands of children at "low-level" risk to learn some hard lessons from the Shannon Matthews case, to follow their instincts, listen to the child, and never, ever, look the other way.