The Child Abuse Inquiry Must Radicalise to Succeed

By Natasha Phillips
Family Law
April 2, 2015

http://www.familylaw.co.uk/news_and_comment/the-child-abuse-inquiry-must-radicalise-to-succeed#.VR7Ok_l_uSp

With scores of Inquiries already under its belt, and dozens more currently underway, Britain must break the mould with the nation's inquiry into child abuse, and implement an investigation that is truly ground-breaking. If it does not, it will be consigned to history as an expensive exercise, which helped no one.

To date, there have been over 70 inquiries focusing on child abuse in the UK, 67 of which have taken place in England. Today, we have 18 working child abuse inquiries in the United Kingdom, the largest in scope being the nation's Statutory Inquiry Into Child Abuse, which will be looking at historic and present day child sexual abuse in England and Wales. If we needed confirmation that cautionary tales and lessons highlighted by previous investigations have gone unheeded, the sheer number of predecessors to the nation's Inquiry serves to remind us. The prevailing inadequacies of serious case reviews for child abuse scandals also paint a grim picture of justice and welfare systems that either don't understand how to implement effective child protection policies, or don't have the resources to do so. The latest research into departmental responses suggests that both are obstacles to prevention. And with children's services departments around the country still struggling in the aftermath of scandal after scandal, progress is often slow at best and at worst, fleeting.

In some ways, the bar has been set low for the nation's Inquiry – very little positive change on the ground means that any recommendations the Inquiry makes are likely to be well received, but they are in danger of being repetitive. Every Inquiry that has gone before it has made recommendations, and reading through them the similarities are at once encouraging, and disheartening. That there appears to be, still, a very limited understanding of how child sexual abuse prevails and a continued and worrying variance in the quality of response to this type of abuse within government departments highlights the questionable impact Inquiries have on improving the welfare of children at risk. Needless to say, tolerance levels for more of the same when it comes to Inquiries, is at an all time low. So it is not unreasonable for the public to ask what the Statutory Inquiry thinks its investigations can genuinely offer the many victims of child abuse, both past and present.

The Inquiry, which officially gets underway this month as Chair Justice Goddard takes the helm on 13th April, has taken considerable inspiration from Australia's Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses Into Child Sexual Abuse. There are many aspects to the Royal Commission's approach that are to be applauded, and emulated, if we must emulate rather than innovate. Their online presence offers an excellent blueprint for our own Inquiry. Engaging and accessible, the Commission has a polished and user friendly website, as well as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts. All a must in the technology era, both for accessibility and transparency purposes. Getting to grips with child sexual abuse as a phenomenon, has led the Commission into difficulty, however. After its establishment in 2013, and two years on, the Royal Commission has come to realise that it cannot make sense of the case studies before it without a deep understanding of child abuse itself, and so faced with a growing knowledge gap, it has now decided to conduct extensive academic and policy research in order to fill the void.