Victims of familial child sexual abuse 'unseen and unheard'
Neil Puffett
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
Local agencies are often "woefully ill-equipped" to deal with child sex abuse in families leaving victims "unseen and unheard", a scathing report has found.
A report by Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission, as well as the Prison and Probation and Fire & Rescue Service inspectorates, also found that "ineffective" criminal investigations are, in the worst cases, leaving children at risk, and calls for action to tackle the issue.
The inspectorates said there is a "worrying lack of knowledge and focus" on familial abuse from all local agencies responsible for dealing with it including children’s social care, health professionals, youth offending services, the police, and probation officers.
They said that while agencies have improved their response to child grooming outside the home, the less high-profile issue of familial sex abuse - sexual abuse by a family member or someone close to the family - is not getting the priority it needs.
The report criticises a lack of clear national or local strategies to address the problem. In response, the government has said it will soon be publishing a national strategy to tackle child sexual abuse.
Familial abuse accounts for around two thirds of all child sex abuse, though the true figure could be higher due to under-reporting, the inspectorates said.
The report, based on six joint targeted area inspections (JTAIs) carried out between September 2018 and May 2019 in Bracknell Forest, Cornwall, Derby, Islington, Shropshire, and York, calls for professionals to give sexual abuse a higher priority in local areas, with improved training and greater awareness-raising of the problem.
"More needs to be done to prevent the sexual abuse of children in the family environment and when it does happen, agencies must work better to protect and support victims and families," the report states.
"Child sexual abuse in the family environment should be just as much of a priority as child sexual exploitation and needs long-term national and local strategies to understand and reduce its prevalence.
"The knowledge that agencies have gained and the systems that have been put in place for dealing with child sexual exploitation are not being applied in the context of abuse within the family environment.
"As a result, frontline professionals are not equipped to know enough about perpetrators of child sexual abuse in the family environment: how to identify them, what their escalation patterns are and how to prevent them from abusing children."
The report reveals that while there are some pockets of good practice, there is a lack of consistency, and "children are not helped and protected well enough".
The inspectorates said practice is too police-led, focusing on the criminal investigation at the expense of children, with health services not always brought into discussions on cases. As a result, children are left without medical treatment for possible sexually transmitted infections, other injuries and without mental health support.
Meanwhile, significant delays to police investigations mean that children are left "in limbo", or at worst are unsafe. Rather than arrest alleged offenders, voluntary attendance is being used by police to interview suspects, so children are not protected by bail. This means potential abusers could be destroying evidence, while inappropriate bail conditions leave abusers free to contact and, in some cases, even return to live with the children they are abusing.
Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s chief inspector, said society is far too reluctant to talk about sex abuse within the family home.
"It’s much easier to think of abuse happening elsewhere, to other people," she said.
"Prevention is the best form of protection. If we are to deal with incest or other abuse involving families or family friends, we must talk openly and honestly about the signs and symptoms – to protect children and to stop abusers in their tracks.
"As it stands, children abused in the home are going unseen and unheard because agencies simply aren’t capable of keeping them safe. The lack of national and local focus on this issue is deeply concerning and must be addressed."
Iryna Pona, policy manager at The Children’s Society, said: “It is appalling that children facing horrific sexual abuse at the hands of those closest to them are too often not getting support and protection from local agencies.
"Sexual abuse by a family member shatters young lives, and we cannot allow it to remain a taboo subject. Time and again we see the same shortcomings in the way professionals respond to sexual abuse of children within families as we do when it comes to sexual exploitation outside the home.
“We need a significant culture change that puts children at the heart of police and social services’ response, coupled with better training for professionals working with children and clear information sharing processes at a local level. But these issues will be extremely difficult to solve without major investment in services for children and families - starting by addressing the £3bn funding gap facing children’s services departments by 2025.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “We are taking urgent action to tackle these crimes and will soon be publishing a first of its kind national strategy to tackle child sexual abuse, better support victims and improve collaboration between the government, agencies and law enforcement.
“Alongside work to better safeguard children new sentencing laws will see serious sexual offenders spending longer behind bars and we are recruiting 20,000 extra police officers to bring more abusers to justice.”
