Child abuse must not be forgotten

 The weekend's formal apology by the Northern Ireland government  to victims of child abuses recalls a story of over a month ago. It made the headlines for a day but, even before the Putin invasion of Ukraine drove all other news from the front pages, just as quickly vanished.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) had carried out case studies in six areas in the UK and found that there was widespread abuse. The IICSA's report (pdf here) concluded that "Children are sexually exploited by networks in all parts of England and Wales in the most degrading and destructive ways". Swansea was one of the areas studied, but as the section of the report makes plain, any city of its size and characteristics could have been chosen. "These six case study areas were selected in order to enable the Inquiry to consider a range of features, including size, demography, geography and social characteristics, and to illustrate different policies, practices and performance on the selected themes". 

Swansea's appearance in the report did trigger coverage on Radio Wales's Sunday Supplement on 6th February, an episode which unfortunately is no longer available. As I recall, in her contribution the Children's Commissioner for Wales Sally Holland expressed disappointment that, in spite of all the concerted effort which had been put in across Wales to disrupt the criminal networks, there was still a long way to go. Her office had been set up twenty years ago in the wake of the North Wales children's homes scandal, when children were not believed. The IICSA report showed that attitudes had still not changed.  She agreed with presenter Vaughan Roderick in reinforcing the point that the report showed that the criminal acts were spread across the whole of England and Wales. There was a high probability that the same criminal organisations operating "county lines" drug deals were also involved in child sexual exploitation.

Perhaps if taxi-drivers of Bengali heritage had been involved in the gangs (as was the case in the abuse which came to light in Rochdale in 2017) the Daily Mail (in particular) would have continued to run the story claiming "political correctness gone mad". (My experience of hiring taxis from the days of my IT contracting was that the drivers were most likely to have been ex-steelworkers or ex-miners.)  In fact, one of the positive measures that had been taken in Wales was to get taxi-drivers and night-workers generally to report to the police if they were aware of suspicious behaviour involving minors, with considerable success. 

The point is that, irrespective of the ethnicity of the organisers, police appear to fight shy of investigating these grooming gangs. This deficiency, which leaves vulnerable children defenceless, must be filled, if necessary by introducing new specialised units in both the police and local authorities. At the very least, there must be more cooperation and information-sharing by police and LAs.