By the time abuse is discovered, it's typically several decades later, by which time the perpetrators will have moved on. For fairly obvious reasons, there'll be no documentary evidence of the abuse, and what documentation there is will be spun from the PoV of the perpetrators.

However, even though nowadays the remaining children's homes are much smaller and there's a different culture in social care departments, there's still plenty of potential for abuse and neglect - Victoria Climbié and Baby P(eter) being the most high-profile examples. Departments are required to undertake a Serious Case Review if a child in their care dies. As they're now published, the same issues crop up time and time again: over-willingness to believe the parents / carers, not interviewing the child alone, poor communication between agencies (e.g. SWs, health professionals, schools), and inadequate case recording (apparently they prefer doing their work face-to-face and some regard detailed case recording as unnecessary bureaucracy - some have apparently claimed they're spending up to 40% of their time doing case recording... I'd imagine if any did spend that long, they would be hopeless technophobes whose approach to typing was 'hunt and peck'!)

Unfortunately, case recording in particular is an issue that is unlikely to go away any time soon - with departments always under-resourced, it's not uncommon for social workers to be dealing with 20+ families at a time (many with large numbers of children). Add on continual changes in legislation impacting upon both practice and recording (e.g. a decade ago, it was common to record most case information on the mother's record - the Integrated Children's System introduced about 5 years ago requires everything to be recorded on the individual children - in practice recording will still be made on a whole family basis then duplicated across all the siblings - the recent Munro Review will allow local authorities to determine their own approach to case recording) not to mention technology (trying to wean social workers off paper files [which are probably only read when preparing for court] and onto electronic case recording systems [whereby the record can easily be examined at any time])...