Child sexual exploitation

I've resisted writing about CSE recently for two related reasons - first, CSE is just incomprehensible to me at a personal level, and second, because it seems to me to be a classic ‘wicked issue' - an evident problem - made worse for me because I fail to understand the nature of the problem - without an evident solution. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, now on its fourth chair, and with a seemingly limitless agenda, is clear evidence of the wickedness of the issue - set up, as it was, with the best of intentions, it shows every sign of descending into chaos.

However, I've been pushed into writing by the ever-expanding football scandal. Without going into detail, the fact that 20 youth coaches have been jailed over the last few years should have raised serious warnings, as, has been shown by the recent level of disclosures, the few coaches so far convicted are the tip of a large and ugly iceberg.

So, we have major scandals relating to taxi-drivers, to football, to children's homes, to boarding schools, to politicians, to the BBC, to higher-level music tuition, to the Church of England, and to the Roman Catholic Church. While almost all people covered by these descriptions are, I'm sure, absolutely blameless, these organisations do seem both to have attracted and accepted abusers, and then either condoned abuse, turned a Nelsonian blind eye towards abuse, or simply failed to put in place the most basic of safeguards. Why this might have been may be simply explained by two cultural factors - the strong tendency of organisations to protect themselves, and the willingness of organisations to protect ‘the talent' whatever the evidence of their misdeeds.

I'm talking here about unimaginable levels of long-term abuse that must have been obvious. Indeed, there is enough evidence of cover-up to demonstrate that not only was the abuse obvious, it was known. And we must never forget that since victim disclosure is so rare, there are almost certain to be as-yet-unmasked abusers.

While I accept ‘autre temps, autre moeurs' this cannot and must not be used to excuse actions that were clearly criminally abusive and coercive at the time.

One of my few direct professional engagements with CSE involved disclosure by a learning disabled adult that he had been abused on a residential trip by his teacher, which we investigated, and found a stinking morass of inappropriate activity. We discovered that there had been a contemporaneous set of complaints in the early 1990s, and that these had led to an arrest, never followed though, and a multi-agency panel which concluded with a recommendation to dismiss. The process problems started with the fact the teacher was not then dismissed but simply given a first written warning by his headteacher, which was later expunged from his file. There was no evidence that the multi-disciplinary panel had ever followed up on the recommendation to dismiss. On checking, the education department and school records had all been ‘lost', perhaps shredded, when the written warning period had ended, so there was no official employer record that there had even been a complaint. The record was eventually partially reconstructed from a combination of police, health and social care records. None of the education officers dealing with the case were in post any longer, and on checking, they had "no recollection" of the case.

One thing I did do was to write to the Lord Chancellor blocking the teacher's appointment to the magistracy, which led to prolonged legal huffing and puffing involving the council leader and the chief executive, from whom I received full support.

Bringing things back to the present day, one of the elements of the police investigation was that they had arrested the teacher and searched his house (remember that this led to a first written warning, no more). They discovered albums with thousands of pictures of children at the local swimming pool where the teacher was a swimming coach. The police had determined that there was not sufficient evidence to charge.

So my question is this: what other institutions and organisations are in the position that football was in, earlier in the year, about to be engulfed by widespread evidence of serious and systematic abuse?

I wouldn't put money on any sporting or educational environment - especially where children are often only partly clothed (swimming, track and field sports) or there is bodily contact (music tuition) and/or there is a power relationship where children work to ‘please' adults. While incomprehensible, it's difficult to believe that any organisation is exempt. (It's worth saying that when I was in charge, the music service moved from one-to-one tuition to small group tuition, partly as a cost saving but also to improve safeguarding.)

So what of the independent inquiry? That's where it all becomes a ‘wicked issue'. We must encourage all those who have survived abuse - and perhaps are living with abuse, now - to come forward. We must assess all the claims to see whether they provide a basis for any legal action. And where legal action can be taken, it must be taken, however long ago the offence, or high-profile the accused. Only by acting in this way can we give any sort of satisfaction to survivors, justice to the accused, and a widespread sense that society just will not accept abuse. The problem is that the inquiry is already vast in scale, hydra-headed in scope, and hugely expensive to the public purse.

I'm no longer at the front line, but the balancing of time and energy among hard-pressed professionals is very clearly an unmanageable task. Would I like a library to close or a historical CSE case to be closed? Would I like a burglary to be dealt with or for the police officer to focus on historical prosecutions? There just isn't time, energy and money to do everything we would like.

So, no answers, I'm afraid.