Children vulnerable to sexual abuse being failed by authorities, say MPs
June 13, 2013 ·
Authorities lack curiosity about those in their care, warn MPs, amid claims of appalling treatment by abusers and agencies
Alexandra Topping
The Guardian, Monday 10 June 2013
Vulnerable children in the UK are still being failed by local authorities, the police and the criminal justice system, which are failing to protect them from sexual exploitation, say MPs.
Recent criminal cases which revealed the devastating impact of sexual exploitation on children have laid bare a “woeful lack of professional curiosity” from statutory agencies in different areas of the country, according to the results released on Monday of an inquiry into child sexual exploitation by the Commons home affairs select committee.
Last month seven men were found guilty at the Old Bailey of subjecting vulnerable girls in Oxford to years of rape, abuse and sexual violence. Last year nine Rochdale men were jailed for their part in a child sexual exploitation gang that targeted vulnerable girls, plying them with alcohol, drugs and gifts; and in 2010 five men were jailed after being found guilty of sex offences against girls as young as 12 in Rotherham and nine men were convicted of grooming and abusing girls in Derby.
Police, social services and the Crown Prosecution Service shared responsibility for preventing the abuse of vulnerable children left unprotected by the system, said the report. Rochdale and Rotherham councils were “inexcusably slow to realise [Š] the widespread, organised sexual abuse of children, many of them in the care of the local authority”.
The report adds: “This is due in large part to a woeful lack of professional curiosity. It is no defence for Rochdale and Rotherham managers to say that they had no knowledge of what was taking place, as they are ultimately responsible and must be held accountable for the appalling consequences of their indifference.”
The committee chair, Keith Vaz, said it had been a harrowing inquiry, which had heard of children being treated appallingly by both their abusers and government agencies. “We were shocked to learn that it is still happening, in every part of the country,” he said. “The quality of the response to the abuse depends on where you live and that is inexcusable.”
Officials who had failed vulnerable children and done little as their childhoods were destroyed should not receive payouts if they had been forced to leave their roles, the MPs said. They called specifically for Roger Ellis, chief executive of Rochdale council for 12 years, to pay back the £76,798 he received as a redundancy payout.
There was a “postcode lottery” in the way different police forces dealt with child sexual exploitation, according to the report, which noted Lancashire police secured 100 prosecutions a year whereas South Yorkshire had none. South Yorkshire’s newly elected police and crime commissioner, Shaun Wright, told the committee he had not met with any victims of child sexual exploitation, the report said, adding: “We suggest Mr Wright may wish to take more of an interest in the victims than he has done previously.”
The report also criticised Greater Manchester police for recording allegations of sexual exploitation as “non-crimes” and asking a victim to sign a disclaimer that said she was unwilling to support a prosecution, calling such behaviour “a betrayal of the victims”.
The education secretary, Michael Gove, was also criticised for rejecting the committee’s recommendation that assistance be given to teachers to help them identify and support children who are at risk. “We are concerned that the Department for Education does not seem to understand the importance of a holistic approach towards safeguarding children,” the MPs wrote.
The committee called for an overhaul of the way vulnerable children are treated by the criminal justice system, including more training and greater awareness. It called on the Ministry of Justice to introduce specialist courts for child sexual exploitation cases and sexual offences, and made an urgent appeal for a system of pre-trial cross-examination – known as “Pigot 2” – to be widely introduced. It detailed cases
Local authorities should ensure funding for the prevention of child sexual exploitation in multi-agency teams, the MPs said, stressing that identification, prevention and early intervention were key to preventing further cases.
The report also concluded there was no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation, despite high-profile cases in Rotherham, Rochdale, Derby and Oxford involving the exploitation of girls by groups composed mainly of Asian men. The report concluded that there was a model of men of mainly Pakistani heritage targeting white girls, but said it was just one of a number of models.
“Stereotyping offenders as all coming from a particular background is as likely to perpetuate the problem as is a refusal to acknowledge that a particular group of offenders share a common ethnicity,” said Vaz. But the report added: “It is difficult to argue that race has had no impact in some of these cases, not just on the part of the perpetrators [Š] but also on the part of their communities, who turned a blind eye to the abuse of hidden BME [black and minority ethnic] victims Š and on the part of professionals who were scared of being labelled racist.”
Barnardo’s CEO Anne Marie Carrie said all agencies and the wider community had to work together to prevent abuse. “Victims of child sexual exploitation are being failed twice: once by the failure to prevent them becoming victims in the first place and again by the failure to take swift action once that abuse has come to light,” she said. “Everyone coming into contact with vulnerable teenagers needs to remember that they are children too, and cannot consent to their own abuse.”
David Tucker, NSPCC head of policy, said: “This report is a damning indictment of systemic failure to protect vulnerable children and young people from horrific sexual abuse and exploitation. Obvious signs of abuse were missed by a number of agencies and there is no excuse for the way these girls were let down, often by the very people who were meant to protect and care for them.
“The victims in recent child sexual exploitation cases were too often ignored or treated as troublemakers. There now needs to be a culture change among police, CPS, the judiciary, and all child protection professionals, so they better understand how grooming gangs operate, and how young people’s behaviour could be a sign they are at risk of, or suffering, sexual exploitation.”
