Fallout from Rotherham abuse: the challenges and implications

NATIONAL PICTURE

The sheer magnitude of suspected abuse over a 16-year period in Rotherham shocked the nation.

Professor Alexis Jay's report estimated that at least 1,400 children were subjected to sexual exploitation in the town between 1997 and 2013, with the overwhelming majority not receiving the help they required.

But were failures on this scale isolated to just one authority or have other councils been guilty of similar shortcomings?

The only national estimate of the scale of the problem came in 2012 when an inquiry by the Office of the Children's Commissioner for England, using data from police, councils, charities, central government, health services and interviews with children and young people, identified 2,400 child sexual exploitation (CSE) victims nationally between August 2010 and October 2011.

A further 16,500 children were identified as being at risk of abuse. But those figures only related to victims who had come into contact with the authorities. In Rotherham, Jay estimated that only around one-third of children affected were previously known to services.

Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) president Alan Wood says local authorities nationally are lacking confidence in terms of what they understand the extent of CSE to be.

"We are in a period where we almost have to suspend disbelief. Whether it is historic child abuse committed by celebrities, abuse and exploitation around residential provision or abuse centred around CSE, we are in a position where we are saying that we didn't know the true extent of it. It is a challenge for us to be confident that we do understand the extent of it."

Although there has been high-profile cases in Rotherham, Rochdale and Oldham, he adds that it is "unlikely" the issue has just affected towns and cities in the North West.

John Cameron, head of child protection operations at the NSPCC, says many local authorities are carrying out CSE "stock takes" in their areas to ensure their understanding of the issue is sound, and that they have appropriate ways of responding to it.

"I know a lot of social work managers and they are doing stock takes now," he says. "People are recognising the importance of ensuring they have clear messages to frontline workers about robustness of investigations and making sure there are appropriate resources to address this."

Giving evidence to the communities and local government select committee, Rotherham's director of children's services Joyce Thacker said she believes councils should carry out a similar exercise to the Jay inquiry to get a true handle on the situation locally.

But she warned that, following the fallout from the Rotherham report, many could be deterred from doing so due to concerns about the negative media and political reaction.

Sir Paul Ennals, ex-chief executive of the National Children's Bureau, says it would be "naive" to think that what happened in Rotherham couldn't be happening elsewhere.

He says the overriding issue was the claims of girls and boys not being taken seriously. "It is the same stuff as was happening with Savile and co with the historic abuse cases - young people not knowing what was appropriate, not blowing the whistle when things started to get out of hand and then, if they did, being disbelieved or disrespected," he says. "The reality is CSE has always been with us in some form. It should be a high priority, as it always should have been."

INSPECTION

Not only was the extent of sexual abuse of children - and lack of action on it - not picked up on by senior Rotherham council officers and politicians, it was also missed by regulators. A joint area review inspection in 2006, carried out by a multidisciplinary team of inspectors from Ofsted, the Commission for Social Care Inspection, the Healthcare Commission, the Adult Learning Inspectorate and the Audit Commission, said the work of all local services in keeping children and young people safe was "good".

"Effective systems are in place for sharing information about, and responding to, children at risk of domestic violence, sexual exploitation and substance misuse," the report states.

In 2010, an Ofsted inspection of safeguarding and looked-after children services rated Rotherham as "adequate", highlighting the Maltby Linx Young Women's project as "an effective partnership which works with vulnerable young women who may be at risk of sexual exploitation or have a number of high risk behaviours".

Debbie Jones, Ofsted's national director for social care, concedes that inspections failed to see what was going on. "It's clear the joint area review report from 2006 did not reflect what was going on."

But Jones adds that other methods of scrutiny are vital if problems are to be spotted.

"Inspections can never be the only barometer of the health of an organisation," she says. "If they were, then everyone would sit back on their laurels once they have had an inspection. An inspection is a snapshot according to the framework at that given time."

Jones says the current single inspection framework - introduced last October - while "not perfect" makes it easier to spot issues, as it has a "completely different focus" to previous frameworks, not just taking into account the views of staff, but also assessing the quality of practice through tracked cases and sample cases.

In response to the Rotherham case, Ofsted will be holding a series of thematic review inspections into CSE arrangements in local authorities - eight will be carried out by the end of October.

Jones stresses that the inspections will not be a "hunt for the worst". "Above all else, what we would want to see is good practice as well as where things are not going well," she says.

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) has also this month launched a series of inspections into how police forces perform in terms of child protection.

FRONTLINE PRACTICE

One of the few services to come out of the Jay report with any credit was youth work. The Risky Business project was the first public service to identify and support young victims of CSE in Rotherham. But despite its good work, the project was "too often seen as something of a nuisance", particularly by children's social care.

Iryna Pona, policy adviser at the Children's Society, says councils must be aware that youth work is a vital tool in addressing CSE and supporting victims.

"It's an issue of trust," she says. "Very often, young people at risk of sexual exploitation have had numerous contacts with statutory services and they usually are not very positive experiences for young people - often they have a distrust of social services, or the police particularly. They are not likely to come forward and disclose abuse.

"I hear all the time from projects that where they help young people, it is because they are able to build trust. Youth projects invest time into building relationships with young people they work with."

Although youth work in Rotherham was undoubtedly achieving results, figures cited in the report show that spending on youth services has dropped from £2.4m in 2010/11 to £1.85m in 2012/13. The decline in funding has been mirrored in authorities across the country.

Andy McCullough, UK head of policy at Railway Children and a trained youth worker, says cuts to youth service budgets in recent years have resulted in reductions in street-based youth work.

"Money has dried up and youth services have almost retracted back into youth centres. Street-based youth work needs to be taken seriously and expanded."

McCullough says the result is that, in many areas, there is now a lack of intelligence about what is happening on the streets. This information, he says, would traditionally have been gathered by outreach youth workers through speaking to young people, adults living in the area and the homeless.

"Young people often don't fit into the same systems and structures of the 9am to 5pm office," he says.

"We have lost some of the relationships we may well have had with children, by not creating something different."

McCullough says pressure needs to be applied both "top down" and "bottom up" to expand youth services. "We need a very clear direction from police and crime commissioners and government to say that local authorities must engage with youth services and have a youth service that is fit for the area's youth.

"Those in power need to engage with senior managers in the youth service and make sure it is part of an authority's multi-agency safeguarding set-up and child protection set-up."

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

There was certainly no shortage of training on CSE in Rotherham, with Jay's report stating that over the years, there was an "impressive amount" carried out.

In 2000, the youth project Risky Business delivered training on the sexual exploitation of children to voluntary and statutory agencies working in the field, as well as to magistrates, the police, schools and foster carers, resulting in a "growing awareness of the seriousness of the problem locally and the numbers of children and young people affected". By 2007, the police had asked Risky Business to contribute to the training of all newly recruited police officers.

Although failures in leadership had the potential to stop any concerns that were raised by frontline professionals being acted on, the scale of abuse that has come to light indicates that much of it still slipped under the radar entirely. So why didn't the training pay off?

ADCS's Alan Wood says while local authorities are generally good at providing training, they have a less impressive record on knowing whether it makes a difference.

"The assumption is that you will deal more effectively with issues, but we don't close the loop and look at what happens once those who have been trained are back in the field. We haven't got systems right for assessing the impact."

He says councils must get better at understanding what works, and what doesn't. "If frontline staff are trained, their managers should be able to identify the impact it is having," he adds. "We might be training people in the wrong things or techniques. How you measure the impact of training is critical."

Amanda Kelly, head of children's services at consultancy firm Impower, says good training should focus on triggering an empathetic connection to the child in question within the recipient.

"You need to get people to think and feel like the people who are experiencing the things that are happening to them," she says.

Professionals were also guilty of blaming the children for their situation rather than seeing them as victims of abuse.

Giving evidence to the communities and local government select committee this month, Rotherham's director of children's services, Joyce Thacker, told MPs that social work students should receive training on child sexual exploitation as part of their course.

LEADERSHIP

The Jay report is scathing about the "blatant" collective failures of council officers in addressing the issue of CSE between 1997 and 2009. Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers.

At an operational level, the police gave no priority to CSE, "regarding many victims with contempt" and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.

The issue of leadership was also previously flagged up in the OCC report - which found a "lack of leadership" among some of the most senior decision makers at local level, accusing them of failing to grasp the gravity of CSE, commit resources to tackling it and co-ordinate multi-agency responses.

Impower's Kelly says there could be merit in councils adopting a different leadership structure. She feels "distributed leadership", whereby authority is shared among individuals and groups who lead each other to the achievement of their goals, could be a better way of getting results on CSE.

"Given the nature of CSE, it requires a number of partners to work together," she says. "Looking at the Rotherham report, it struck me that there were so many different opportunities for people to have done something differently, I wonder whether a lot of it was because of hierarchy and traditional organisational boundaries preventing people doing the right thing."

ADCS president Wood says effective leadership is a result of competence and confidence. Although he says there are good systems and strategies for dealing with CSE present in many authorities, a lack of clarity on the true extent of the issue undermines the confidence of leaders.

"When you are confident, you are willing to challenge, and when you are competent you are able to assess information and see if it doesn't add up," he says.

RESOURCES AND JOINT WORKING

From the early 2000s, Rotherham started to experience problems in the recruitment of social workers, while facing budget pressures and high levels of demand.

Although children's services funding increased between 2009 and 2013, Rotherham is set to lose a third of its budget in real terms by 2016 compared to 2010/11 levels.

In her report, professor Jay makes it clear that such levels of cuts pose significant risk to councils' ability to tackle CSE. "These figures highlight the extreme pressure that cuts in public spending are placing on councils such as Rotherham."

Ray Jones, professor of social work at Kingston University, says funding cuts will put councils under pressure to cut corners when investigating abuse allegations.

"Local authorities and police ... will be looking to find reasons not to act: to take on new work you have to close work down and the danger is you close it down too quickly."

Sue Berelowitz, deputy children's commissioner for England, says: "I'm worried that reduced resources could provide an excuse for people to say they can't do this work. There is a lot of work to be done to identify victims and the scale of the problems in each area and the resources necessary to address it."

Cuts to youth work nationally have been some of the deepest in children's services, yet youth workers were the ones who first raised the alarm in Rotherham.

Fiona Blacke, chief executive of the National Youth Agency, says the "sharp decline" in youth workers could have implications for vulnerable young people.

"Without the presence of youth workers in the frontline, a crucial element of child protection is removed - something no local authority can afford to be complacent about."

Jones also says that when money is tight, joint working suffers. "CSE work requires local information sharing and intelligence across agencies and workers. If people don't get the money to do that, it will make it harder to do well."

Berelowitz says collaboration between agencies is essential to tackling CSE. "Dedicated CSE teams drawn from police and local authorities are part of the solution, but you have to bring other agencies together to ensure planning is co-ordinated."

THE REPORT FINDINGS

• The report makes the "conservative" estimate that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013
• In a third of the cases, children subjected to sexual exploitation were previously known to services because of concerns raised about child protection and neglect
• Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated
• By far the majority of perpetrators were described as "Asian" by victims
• The report states that "from the beginning", there was evidence that CSE was a serious problem in Rotherham, with the issue being flagged up in a series of reports

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

• The government's troubled families tsar Louise Casey will conduct an investigation into Rotherham Council - probing its governance and its work with children and young people
• The authority will also be examined as part of a government-commissioned independent inquiry into historical child sexual abuse being conducted by lord mayor of London Fiona Woolf
• South Yorkshire Police's chief constable David Crompton has ordered an independent investigation into the force's handling of CSE
• Ofsted will conduct eight thematic inspections to assess how local authorities are dealing with CSE

EXPERT VIEW: LOCAL AUTHORITIES ARE ILL-EQUIPPED TO PROPERLY TACKLE CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE

Camila Batmanghelidjh, director of Kids Company

To the untrained eye, the sad and prolific sexual abuse of children could look like an exception, with Rotherham potentially being defined as a "rogue authority". Close analysis of professor Alexis Jay's report reveals at least 65 official documents produced by statutory and voluntary institutions dating back to 2005 that reflect expression of concern. A range of organisations had raised the alarm about systemic paedophile activity. So one wonders why robust action was not taken.

There is a suggestion from some quarters that concerns about racial stability led to the predominantly Pakistani group of abusers not being challenged. Then we're told that the children were not subject to a child protection plan, which would have ensured more accountability, because Rotherham wanted to keep its child protection figures below a certain number. In the report, there is some suggestion that people close to the police or involved within it may have even colluded with some of the abusers.

Whichever way you look at this tragedy, the bottom line points to competent adults failing to protect children who were being harmed. It would be a mistake to think Rotherham and the unfolding of this horror is an exception. I can tell you that currently thousands of girls and boys are being harmed in street gangs, used as sexual trophies, violated without being afforded protection. Professionals know about it.

Childhood maltreatment, sexual or otherwise, is happening at a devastating and chronic scale in Britain. It's all over the country and it knows no racial divide. What is clear is that councils have no capacity to deal with the scale of it. They don't have the money, the necessary reparative services or the prevention programmes.

Britain is uniquely vulnerable to having its children systemically maltreated. On the one hand, it boasts probably the world's best child protection policies. On the other hand, Ofsted has declared only 40 per cent of its child protection departments as satisfactory or good. In fact, there is an unspoken understanding between governments and local authorities not to capture the real number of children needing help so that money doesn't get spent on them.

There is a lack of political leadership about the importance and sanctity of childhood. How can we have confidence in a political system that has no narrative, no philosophy, no leadership and no vision for the protection of children and thinks it good enough to simply be reactive when maltreatment of children becomes public?