Met Police failing child exploitation victims, report finds
Amrit Virdi
Monday, February 12, 2024
There is an “insufficient focus on child exploitation at a senior level” of the Metropolitan Police, a damning report finds.
An inspection of the London police force, led by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS), examined 244 investigations into child exploitation and rated more than half of them as “inadequate”.
Just 43 were deemed to be “good”, according to the report, which states that “the force can’t fully understand the nature and scale of child exploitation in London”.
The report finds that “the force often uses officers and staff to investigate child exploitation who don’t have the necessary skills or knowledge to do this effectively” with there being “missed opportunities to identify suspects and disrupt their activity, and to carry out evidence-led prosecutions”.
It was also found that “many officers and staff in the force fail to identify exploitation or understand the links between missing children and exploitation” and the force “prioritised the likelihood of a successful prosecution rather than safeguarding children and promoting their welfare”.
“Delays in action being taken, lines of enquiry not being followed and poor supervision of investigations” alongside “victim-blaming language” and “unlinked IT systems” were other areas of concern. There was a call for the force to follow the Code of Practice for Victims of Crime more strictly.
Case studies referenced in the report include an example of a 14-year-old girl whose mother reported, with evidence, to the police that a man was grooming her, with the child also frequently going missing.
Officers told the mother that the child would have to report the incident herself. After the mother phoned again the next day, the force recorded a crime but the case was passed between six different detective sergeants in three different teams before it was allocated to an investigator. It was four weeks before anything was recorded and the child had gone missing again in that time.
However, the report also states that evidence of “good work to protect children” include “the Metropolitan Police Service’s online child sexual abuse and exploitation teams”. It was also emphasises that “many officers and staff we met were committed to providing a better service but were frustrated by having too much work to complete”.
Yet, it also highlights a need for urgent change, recommending 11 calls for action to the Met Police.
These include:
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Letting staff with the correct knowledge and skills work on exploitation cases.
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Training the force to understand the effect of victim-blaming language.
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Effectively and accurately recording demographic information.
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Having a specific policy for dealing with missing people and make sure age-appropriate policies are used that suit children rather than adults.
In response to the report, commander Kevin Southworth, lead for Public Protection at the Met, said: “I’m deeply sorry to the children and families we have let down and want to reassure our communities that we are already taking significant steps to address these recommendations.
"We are putting more police resource into this area and retraining officers to have a better understanding of the complexities of child exploitation so we can continue our work to win back the trust of Londoners.”
