A damning report into the Northern Territory's child protection sector has laid out what officials are calling "confronting" and "heartbreaking" failures leading up to the alleged murder of five-year-old Warlpiri girl Kumanjayi Little Baby - failures that include the radical notion that maybe someone should have checked whether the adults entrusted with her care had a criminal history.

Little Baby was found dead in April, five days after she was allegedly abducted from a town camp in Alice Springs. Police charged Jefferson Lewis, a 47-year-old man who was neither a member of the child's family nor known to her mother, with murder. He has been remanded in custody and is yet to enter a plea.

The minister for children and families, Robyn Cahill, tabled the report in NT parliament on Tuesday. The NT government commissioned the independent review - conducted by former New South Wales police commissioner Karen Webb and senior public servant Greg Shanahan - in the wake of the child's death.

Cahill said the report showed a "recurrent pattern" in how police worked alongside the department, one that allowed children to be placed in the care of adults without a criminal background check. "[There were] serious gaps between what the law required of the department, and how the law was applied," she told parliament. "Gaps in policy, in process, and most critically, gaps in how risk to children was being assessed."

The details, as Cahill laid them out, are grim. Kumanjayi Little Baby's family was known to the department before she was born. Her mother was assaulted at least twice while pregnant with her. When the child was 17 weeks old, a safety plan was put in place that relied on adults from the family's network to keep her safe. The review found no evidence that police or background checks were done on any of them.

It was later established that one of those adults had a long and violent criminal history - including five counts of threat-to-kill. "These were the adults trusted to keep a baby safe," Cahill said. "How can something as basic as checking if they are safe to be around children not be standard practice."

The NT government has accepted all 45 recommendations made by the report, which is at least a start.

The interim report, released in July, said "the review team have not been able to draw a nexus between the matters referred to DCF [the Department of Children and Families] and the circumstances leading to KLB's [Kumanjayi Little Baby's] abduction." It noted the child's mother had been the victim of domestic and family violence, but that "despite repeated indicators of domestic and family violence, the cumulative impact of the violence and its implications for the child's safety were not adequately recognised, and protective responses were not pursued in a timely manner."

In other words: the warning signs were there, repeatedly, and the system tasked with protecting a child did not act on them. The report calls it a gap. The rest of us might call it something blunter.