UNITED KINGDOM
Family Law
Natasha Phillips
02 APR 2015
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.
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