Home Affairs Committee slams failings over child sexual exploitation

The police, social services and the Crown Prosecution Service must all bear responsibility for the way in which vulnerable children who were victims of child sexual exploitation were left unprotected by the system, MPs have said.

In its report, Child sexual exploitation and the response to localised grooming, the Home Affairs Committee said Rochdale and Rotherham Councils in particular were “inexcusably slow to realise that the widespread, organised sexual abuse of children, many of them in the care of the local authority, was taking place on their doorstep”.

The committee claimed that this was due “in large part to a woeful lack of professional curiosity”.

The report said: “It is no defence for Rochdale and Rotherham managers to say that they had no knowledge of what was taking place, as they are ultimately responsible and must be held accountable for the appalling consequences of their indifference to the suffering of vulnerable children.”

The committee made a series of recommendations, including that the Ministry of Justice ought to implement a number of reforms to court processes such as section 28 of of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 (known as ‘Pigot 2’).

It also urged the MoJ to introduce specialist courts either for child sexual exploitation cases or for sexual offences as a whole. In addition, the committee said the Lord Chief Justice should be asked to consider recommending to the Judicial College that specific training on child sexual exploitation cases be developed and provided to the judiciary.

The report meanwhile called on all local authorities to ensure that there was sufficient funding for prevention within the budget of any multi-agency team tasked with tackling child sexual exploitation.

Echoing a recent plea for clarity made by the independent reviewing officer for Rochdale, the committee called on the Government to commission work examining the feasibility of introducing a statutory duty to co-operate and share information to tackle child sexual exploitation. 

Other key recommendations and findings included that:

• It should be the fundamental, working assumption of all frontline staff working with children and young people that sexual relations between an adult and a child under the legal age of consent are non-consensual, unlawful and wrong;
• Directors of Childrens Social Care must ensure that they have received adequate training on the issue of child sexual exploitation;
• All frontline council workers, even those who do not work directly with children and young people, ought to be trained to recognise the signs of localised grooming and the indicators of child sexual exploitation, and should know how to report anything that might give them cause to believe that a child is at risk;
• Local authorities should ensure that there are clear lines of dialogue between their children’s social care departments and their licensing boards. As part of their scrutiny role, Local Safeguarding Children’s Boards should monitor the relationship between children’s social care departments and licensing boards and ensure that any recommendations made to the licensing board are acted upon;
• The Government should look again at the relationship between schools and local authorities in regards to highlighting concerns about missing children;
• The forthcoming statutory guidance on children who run away or go missing from home or care should require local authorities to conduct return interviews, delivered by an independent professional a child or young person is comfortable speaking with, to all children who run away or go missing from home or care, within 72 hours of a missing incident;
• The Government should ensure that all teachers are provided with the list of warning signs for child sexual exploitation and the contact details of a named individual within the local authority that they can contact with any concerns;
• Schools should be reminded annually of their statutory responsibilities by the Secretary of State.

The MPs meanwhile insisted there was no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation. “It is a vile crime which is perpetrated by a small number of individuals, and abhorred by the vast majority, from every ethnic group. However, evidence presented to us suggests that there is a model of localised grooming of mainly Pakistani-heritage men targeting young White girls.”

The MPs said this was just one of a number of models of child sexual exploitation and warned authorities not to focus on it to the exclusion of others.

“Stereotyping offenders as all coming from a particular background is as likely to perpetuate the problem as is a refusal to acknowledge that a particular group of offenders share a common ethnicity,” the report said.

The Rt Hon Keith Vaz MP, chair of the Home Affairs Committee, said: “This has been a harrowing inquiry in which we have heard of children being treated in an appalling way not just by their abusers but, because of catastrophic failures by the very agencies that society has appointed to protect them. We were shocked to learn that it is still happening, in every part of the country.

“The quality of the response to the abuse depends on where you live and that is inexcusable. We must not accept assurances that the situation is improving without hard evidence. Race is a factor but it is one of many in cases of child sexual exploitation.”

Vaz argued that those officials who failed to act should not be allowed to evade responsibility through early retirement or resignation for other reasons and should not be paid compensation of any kind.

“Children only have one chance at childhood, once that childhood is stolen by the horrific crime of sexual exploitation, it cannot be returned,” he added. “Protection of these vulnerable children must be our first priority."