Consultation on preventing child sexual abuse in Wales launched
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Cambrian News
6 days ago
- Cambrian News
Consultation on preventing child sexual abuse in Wales launched
This strategy will also be key in further delivery on recommendations from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) and builds upon work already undertaken under the previous National Action Plan.
Spectator
02-07-2025
- Spectator
Letters: What public inquiries get wrong
Movers and shakers Sir: As a parish priest of 35 years, I read Francis Pike's account of his supernatural experiences ('Happy mediums', 28 June) with little surprise. Over the years, I have been approached by parishioners troubled by poltergeists, apparitions, unexplained odours, 'friendly' spirits and, in one case, cutlery and glasses flying off tables. In every instance, my approach has been the same. Accompanied by another person, I visit the home and enquire whether the household has been involved in any occult practices – Ouija boards, tarot cards, consulting mediums and the like. Almost invariably, the answer is yes. I then encourage repentance from such practices and a turning to Christ as Lord. We pray through every room in the house, dedicating it to Christ and commanding any evil presence to depart. Where people have allowed us to pray in this way, the disturbances have ceased – and the individuals involved have experienced peace and freedom from fear. In many cases, they have also come to faith and joined our church, having encountered a deeper and more powerful spiritual reality. We would do well to recall Hamlet's words: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' The Revd Richard Coombs Rector of Cheltenham Fond farewell Sir: The map 'Ghosts of London' (28 June) omitted the former Middlesex Hospital in Mortimer Street, where I nursed from 1960 to 1964. It was widely known that the ghost of a Victorian nurse visited terminally ill patients a night or two before they died. Two of my patients – a 14-year-old boy and a woman in her eighties – told me that a 'nice sister in a long dress' had offered them a drink of water and wished them good night. Both passed peacefully away the following evening. Lilian Gellnick Barnet, Hertfordshire The people's voice Sir: As the lawyer who represented the largest group of victims in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), I can confirm that John Power's analysis of what IICSA got wrong in its investigation of grooming gangs ('The need to know', 21 June) is largely correct. But he misses an important issue, which also bedevils many other public inquiries. In assessing the response of police and social services, IICSA relied too heavily on evidence from corporate witnesses: persons designated to speak on behalf of the relevant police force or social services department but who had little or no direct involvement in actual cases. This type of witness has a tendency to paint a rosy picture of service delivery at odds with the reality on the ground. To find out what has really been happening, the next grooming gangs inquiry will have to delve into individual case files and call those directly involved: police officers, social workers and the victims themselves. The blandishments of corporate witnesses, who are good at PR but were not directly involved in the real action, will need to be resisted. Without this proper scrutiny a further inquiry will have little value. Richard Scorer Head of Abuse Law and Public Inquiries, Slater and Gordon, Manchester Heavy heart Sir: One hates to sound like a snob but Arabella Byrne ('Brown study', 28 June) is simply wrong. She argues that millennials are turning away from older furniture passed down from their forebears principally because it retains no economic value. Nothing could be further from the truth. Simply trawl the catalogues of Lyon & Turnbull, Sotheby's or Woolley & Wallis. If the side table is selling for only £30, it was probably made by the Ikea of its day. But to think of value only in monetary terms misses the point. The joy of brown furniture is the history and the story. We are custodians of time and memory. I personally can't get enough of the stuff. One of my recent auction finds? An 18th-century commode from Leeds Castle. There are many ways to interpret the value of brown. Chris Sibbald New Town, Edinburgh Quelle horreur Sir: Catriona Olding's reflections on 'andouillette' (Still life, 21 June) brought back vivid memories of my own encounters with this dish. My last three years of seminary were spent in Paris, where everything was great apart from what was served in the refectory. Rumbling stomachs at midday prayer signalled the mad dash for whatever poor fare was on offer, but if andouillette was on the menu, I couldn't even enter the room because of the stench. Some of my confrères were very keen on andouillette, so when dining out with them, I made sure that we chose an outdoor table to avoid being at close quarters with unbearable odours. As much as the French might mock la malbouffe anglaise, one of their own comedians, speaking about French political life, inadvertently admitted to how awful andouillette actually is when he said: 'La politique, c'est comme l'andouillette, ça doit sentir un peu la merde, mais pas trop.' The Revd Ross S.J. Crichton Isle of Eriskay, Outer Hebrides Rein drops Sir: Flora Watkins's comments on horse droppings ('Farewell to the old country', 21 June), brought back fond memories of my childhood in north London. Many of the deliveries, such as milk and old clothes, were made by horse and cart. My father used to give us children sixpence if we went with bucket and spade to bring back any horse droppings to use as manure for his vegetable garden. We were delighted to spot the 'gifts' the horses had left us. Sheila Berger Bern, Switzerland
Spectator
19-06-2025
- Spectator
The right rape gang inquiry
Another inquiry into child sexual abuse, another minister insisting that this time it will be different. Yvette Cooper promises arrests, reviews, a new statutory commission and the largest ever national operation against grooming gangs. But for the victims there is only one question that matters: what will this new inquiry do that the last one didn't? The last one, of course, was IICSA: the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, led by Professor Alexis Jay. It took seven years, £180 million and 15 separate investigations to complete. And yet for survivors and campaigners, the abiding feeling at the end of it all was futility. IICSA had all the grandeur of a public reckoning but little of the justice. It was supposed to examine how institutions failed victims. Instead, it often resembled a procedural exercise: detailed, solemn, but ultimately toothless. Grooming gangs – the most politically explosive scandal of all – were only one part of the report, and not even the most central part. It's worth remembering what IICSA didn't do. It didn't summon senior officials under oath from the councils and police forces most complicit in cover-ups. It didn't re-open the Rotherham files or interrogate why officers in Rochdale turned a blind eye. It didn't assign blame. No one was sacked or prosecuted. And the abuse of white working-class girls by Pakistani men has continued. What went wrong? In part, the answer lies in IICSA's vastness. It was tasked with investigating abuse 'in any institution'. It tried to do everything, and so did very little. Dame Lowell Goddard, its first substantive chair, resigned after a year, amid press reports alleging she had in private connected paedophilia in Britain to the prevalence of 'Asian men'. Although she denied this, some commentators suggested she was pushed out of her position because she was willing to pursue the racial aspect of the scandal too vigorously for the Establishment's taste. When Professor Jay took over, the inquiry quickly became a compromise. Less testimony under oath, more closed sessions. More 'survivor forums' in place of public hearings. The kind of scrutiny that might have terrified local councillors or police officers – some of whom we now know were complicit – never materialised. Jay was praised for her 2014 report into Rotherham, but under her leadership IICSA avoided detailed scrutiny of grooming gangs and limited the use of public hearings or sworn testimony. Instead we got another nod to 'institutional failure', another recommendation for a new 'Minister for Children'. It was bureaucratic musical chairs, the default response of the British state when it is confronted with a horror it would rather avoid. Then, in January, Baroness Casey, a former Victims' Commissioner, was commissioned by the Home Secretary to carry out a rapid national audit into grooming gangs. Her findings included a recommendation to hold a full national inquiry, which was duly announced by Cooper on Monday. Her report did what IICSA refused to: it focused on the racial dimension and acknowledged institutional evasion. Casey confirms that Pakistani men are disproportionately represented among grooming gang offenders, and that many local agencies avoided confronting the issue for fear of being called racist. For all the praise her audit has earned, it still falls short. It is full of faddish red herrings about the 'adultification' of adolescent girls. Did the perpetrators target pubescent white girls because they were subconsciously 'adultifying' them? Of course not. This drivel is harmful, as it reframes a specific problem – British Pakistani men targeting vulnerable white girls – into a wider critique of society and its attitude towards adolescent girls, for which we are all allegedly culpable. One part of the review, quoted by Cooper in her speech, featured a line from a police officer who stated that 'If Rotherham were to happen again today it would start online'. This statement not only implies that Rotherham was a one-off historic incident; it again recasts the issue of racialised grooming into a Luddite whinge about the online world. The fact that the police would prefer the focus of the inquiry to be on the internet, which they can access from the safety of their offices – rather than the real world in which racialised grooming happens – is unsurprising. What should this new national review aim to do? First, it must treat the scandal as an ongoing national emergency. As recently as January, eight Pakistani men in Keighley were sentenced for the sexual abuse of girls as young as 13. Some survivors believe the problem is worse today than it's ever been. Cooper has announced that more than 1,000 closed cases are being reopened. But the new inquiry must map the networks in the same way that the Metropolitan police's old Gangs Violence Matrix did, before it was shut down in 2022 over accusations of racism. Second, this inquiry must make full use of its statutory powers. IICSA excluded Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxford from thereport on the grounds that 'independent investigations' had already taken place. The result was an evasion of accountability. Key individuals were never questioned. Blame was dispersed into a haze of lessons and reviews. This time, there can be no excuses. If police chiefs ignored abuse warnings, they must be named. If senior council officers buried reports to avoid accusations of racism, they should explain themselves. Justice demands that individuals, not just systems, are held to account. We must make an example out of those who prioritised their own comfortable lives over preventing the abuse of children. Third, it must ask the difficult questions that IICSA and others wouldn't. Was religious doctrine used to justify this abuse? Were vulnerable white girls seen as 'fair game' because they were not Muslim? Did authorities look the other way because they feared that to intervene would be to inflame racial or religious sensitivities? How far were the police complicit? Did Pakistani gangs intimidate witnesses and social workers? These are not conspiratorial talking points – they are evidenced in transcripts from trials and elsewhere. An inquiry must drag these questions into the light without bogus, cowardly equivocation around 'Islamophobia'. Success in this review will not look like victim panels and 'enhanced data-sharing'. Instead, it will look like accountability in parts of the country which we know to be afflicted by racialised rape gangs. Take Bradford. It has never had a full public inquiry, yet its story is one of the most shocking. Fiona Goddard, a survivor, says she was raped by more than 50 men while living in a council–run children's home. David Greenwood, the solicitor who played a key role in exposing Rotherham, believes Bradford could be worse still. Based on safeguarding statistics, he estimates up to 72,000 children may have been at risk of exploitation there since 1996. That figure seems implausible until you learn that in just eight months, 2,500 children were classed as 'at risk' by local authorities. Yet Bradford's institutions resist scrutiny. Susan Hinchcliffe, Bradford Council's leader, refused to commission a local inquiry in October 2021, and Tracy Brabin, the West Yorkshire mayor, refused similar calls on the grounds of limited local resources which would be better spent protecting women and girls today instead of investigating 'the past'. Here is the test: this new national inquiry must force a reckoning in Bradford. If it confines itself to the usual places and people, the usual bland conclusions, it will have failed. Bradford doesn't need community cohesion statements or survivor focus groups. It needs summonses. It needs officials under oath. It needs the truth. Anything less will just be a repeat of IICSA and its shortcomings.
