Probe into Handling of Child Abuse Claims

By Jill Lawless
Irish Examiner
July 7, 2014

http://www.irishexaminer.com/world/probe-into-handling-of-child-abuse-claims-274670.html

By Jill Lawless, London

The British government vowed to discover whether public institutions have exposed vulnerable children to sexual abuse — and whether authorities suppressed abuse allegations to protect politicians and other powerful people.

Home Secretary Theresa May said a panel of legal and child-protection experts would investigate how public agencies, including governments and hospitals, handled child abuse allegations. She said she set up the inquiry after “appalling cases of organised and persistent” sexual abuse, including decades of assaults by the late TV host Jimmy Savile.

“Some of these cases have exposed a failure by public bodies to take their responsibilities seriously,” May told the House of Commons.

May said a related investigation, led by National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children chief executive Peter Wanless, would examine whether abuse claims handed to authorities in the 1980s were lost or destroyed to protect wrongdoers.

Last year, an internal government inquiry found that 114 files relating to allegations of child abuse that were handed to officials had been lost or destroyed.

A pledge was made yesterday to investigate claims that politicians may have sexually abused children in the 1980s in a conspiracy by members of the establishment who used their power to cover up the crimes.

The allegations have jarred the current political elite just as Britain is grappling with revelations that some national celebrities had sexually abused children for decades.

“We are going to leave no stone unturned to find out the truth about what happened,” Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters. “Three things need to happen: Robust inquiries that get to truth; police investigations that pursue the guilty and find out what has happened; and proper lessons learned so we make sure these things cannot happen again.”

The unmasking of late BBC television presenter Jimmy Savile as one of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders has forced a wider questioning about how paedophiles in positions of power could sow such damage while evading detection for so long.

Once feted as a national treasure, Savile is now known to have used his fame to get unsupervised access to his victims, raping and abusing girls, boys, men, women and even dead bodies.

Fears that claims of abuse by politicians were not properly investigated at the time were stoked when one of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s most trusted advisers admitted there may well have been a cover-up of child abuse in the 1980s.

“At that time I think most people would have thought that the establishment, the system, was to be protected,” said Norman Tebbit, a former Conservative minister.

“And if a few things had gone wrong here and there that it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far,” he said. “That view was wrong.”

Such a blunt assessment of the priorities of an earlier Britain was explosive, prompting front-page headlines about “V.I.P. Paedos” in local print media and leading national television news bulletins.

Abuse claims have sullied the reputations of some of the world’s most venerated institutions: Pope Francis yesterday told victims of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clerics that the Church should “weep and make reparation” for crimes.

In Britain, local media have alleged that a group of British politicians and others in positions of authority may have used their positions to abuse children in state care during the 1980s. It was not possible to independently evaluate those claims.