An inquiry has reported “extensive failures by local authorities and police” in tackling gangs that sexually abuse and exploit children.
The report by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse found that authorities and police forces may have downplayed the abuse due to concerns about negative publicity.
Attackers were using “new ways” to groom younger children via social media and dating apps while abuse was being “increasingly underestimated”, the report found.
Some victims were blamed by authorities, and given criminal records for offences linked to their sexual exploitation.
The IICSA said there was ‘a flawed assumption’ that child sexual exploitation was ‘on the wane’, with authorities denying the scale of the problem despite evidence to the contrary.
The report said this might be down to a determination to not be seen as ‘another Rochdale or Rotherham’ – towns blighted by recent child sexual exploitation revelations – rather than a desire to ‘root out…and expose its scale’.
The report comes after a decade of concern over groups of men mostly of south Asian origin targeting girls – most notably in Rotherham, but also in Rochdale, Newcastle, Oxford, Telford, Dewsbury and Halifax.
The IICSA said: ‘It is unclear whether a misplaced sense of political correctness or the sheer complexity of the problem have inhibited good quality data collection generally and on ethnicity more specifically.’
Over the course of two months in 2020, the inquiry heard evidence from more than 30 witnesses which revealed how police and local authorities failed to properly tackle the problem, often dismissing victims as making promiscuous lifestyle choices, despite the fact they were children and under the age of legal consent.
One victim said her parents were heroin addicts and she was taken into foster care when she was 10 years old. From the age of 13 she was regularly sexually exploited by adult men who also supplied her with alcohol, cannabis and cigarettes. They were subsequently prosecuted, but the victim described the trial as “very much like I was being bullied” and said defence barristers accused her of being racist and “a slag”.
Another victim grew up in a family where there was neglect and domestic violence. From the age of 12 she was sexually exploited by a 30-year-old man who forced her to have sex with other men. She said children’s social care opened and closed her case on multiple occasions, with records showing one of the reasons behind a decision to close her case was because they thought she was “putting herself at risk”. Aged 14, she was forced to perform oral sex on more than 20 adult men. This was also filmed. A number of men were charged, although the charges were later dropped.
Yet another victim spent her childhood in a number of council-run children’s homes. From the age of 14, she was sexually abused and made to have sexual intercourse with adult men. She said staff in the children’s homes were “aware that she was having sex with an older male” but were dismissive and took no action to protect her. The abuse escalated and she said when she was 18 years old, she was raped by the main perpetrator of her exploitation. No action was taken by the police, who considered that she had consented. She had a breakdown and tried to take her own life because she felt that “it was easier for the police to criminalise the children rather than go after the abusing adults”.
In 2017, our late Director, Norman Wells, published his report ‘Unprotected‘ which outlined the scandal of children being sexually exploited due to authorities turning a blind eye to underage children being sexually active.
Concluding his report, Norman stated the following points:
- Even though the serious case reviews and independent inquiry in Rotherham have repeatedly identified the normalisation of underage sex as a major reason for the complacency of child protection agencies, the government has given no indication that it has any plans to address the issue.
- The evidence demonstrates that a review of professional attitudes
towards underage sexual activity and an investigation into the
unintended consequences of teenage pregnancy strategies that have a
focus on sex education and confidential contraceptive services are long
overdue. - The problem of child sexual exploitation is not primarily systemic,
but social, cultural and moral. It will therefore not be resolved by
restructuring and improved communications within local authority
and police departments. - There needs to be a fundamental change in how children and young
people are treated, how parental responsibility is understood, how the
family unit is regarded, and how the law is administered
Family Education Trust Trustee, Sarah Carter, commented: “It is tragic to read that children are still being systematically sexually exploited through the normalisation of underage sex.
A child should never be described as ‘promiscuous’ or ‘putting themselves at risk’. The law remains that the legal age of consent is 16, and it is shocking to learn that concerns are only raised by social services when a child is under the age of 13.
The Police ‘failure’ should not be reduced to the recording ethnicities of suspects. The Police should be upholding the age of consent law and protecting children from all sexual abuse; networks or otherwise.”