[ACNS source: Church of England] The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, has made a strong plea for society to look afresh at the needs of children and young people at risk.

In a sermon preached at the National Festival Service of the Children's Society in Canterbury Cathedral yesterday, Dr Williams said, "We are required to face the fact that, for all our corporate sentimentality about childhood and for all our well-meant protocols about the protection of children, thousands of our children in Britain are invisible and their sufferings unnoticed."

Too often, he added, we notice too late that "there are actions to be taken, things to put in place that may contain damage or avoid future tragedy, but the cost is already there, and if we are honest we can't help acknowledging that we have not had the right habits of attention. Thousands of children have been invisible to us."

Dr Williams, making his first major address on children's policy since becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, warned that "the demands on statutory and voluntary resources will go on spiralling if we do not address the prior question of our attitude to children in general and children at risk in particular."

The Archbishop highlighted the importance of approaches to family life: "Not only how we conduct our own, but how we share it, how we think about equipping a new generation to approach their responsibilities."

And he was sharply critical of aspects of a youth justice system "that is still astonishingly slow to treat a child as a child and to face the question of how the emotional void that so often appears in 'criminal' children is to be addressed and healed." There were "very serious" questions about a youth justice system in which "the welfare needs of children are still so often sidelined."

Dr Williams supported the idea of a Children's Commissioner in England , but argued that it would need to be matched by proper governmental co-ordination.

Dr Williams, who is a President of the Children's Society, praised its work. "The Children's Society is committed to seeing children whole, and to enabling all of us to share this seeing," he said. "It is in that sense simply taking its lead from Christ, who, we read, 'took a little child and had him stand among them' - had him stand where he could be seen."

He added, "What we are told to learn from children, I suspect, is not just the spontaneous joy or trust that we might first think of when told to become like little children, but also a kind of endurance and courage, even wisdom, that breaks the heart because we find it so difficult to believe that such hard things can be learned so early."