“Professionals turned a blind eye”. This phrase feels rather hackneyed, but it still captures the essence of much that has happened in the grooming gangs scandal, and the widespread denial to which Louise Casey devoted a whole chapter of her recent report. But how do we tackle the problem of professional blindness? IICSA, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse which delivered its final report in 2022, and in which I represented the largest victim group, considered this problem for 7 years.
People imagine that if they discovered child sex abuse, they would immediately report it. In the real world, however, all too frequently they don’t. As IICSA discovered, there are lots of reasons why — timidity, fear of professional consequences, and in the case of grooming gangs a reluctance to face hard truths about perpetrators’ cultural backgrounds. But the failure to report is pervasive. One of IICSA’s key recommendations, then, was for a mandatory reporting law — a law requiring professionals who work with children to report knowledge or reasonable suspicion of abuse to statutory authorities, with a criminal sanction for failing to report.
You might assume we had such a law already; most people do. In reality, it remains entirely legal in this country for a teacher to know that a child has been raped, and to do nothing about it. The teacher might breach professional codes, but commits no criminal offence. Looking at the grooming gangs scandal, a mandatory reporting law with criminal sanctions could give us what we currently lack — a legal mechanism to hold to account those who cover up or turn a blind eye to abuse. It obviously wouldn’t be a panacea; but it would be a good start.
In January this year, in the face of a social media furore, the government promised to implement IICSA’s mandatory reporting recommendation “in full”. It claims to be doing this in the form of clauses added to the Crime and Policing Bill, currently before Parliament. However, the government’s proposal isn’t the one IICSA recommended — it’s a watered down version.
Under the government’s proposed legislation, the “duty to report” child sex abuse does not carry the criminal sanction recommended by IICSA. Worse still, the duty to report only applies if you actually witness abuse happening, or the child or the abuser tells you about it, or you see or hear an image or recording of abuse. These are the only circumstances under which the duty to report is triggered; any other evidence, no matter how compelling, does not have to be reported. This is a critical flaw in the Bill: children who have been groomed rarely disclose sex abuse, perpetrators almost never do, abuse is only rarely witnessed and most abuse isn’t filmed. The vast majority of cases IICSA investigated did not involve children disclosing abuse. Instead, what happened was that other well-grounded suspicions of abuse were not passed on to the authorities.
What does this mean in practice? I represent young women who were raped and abused by grooming gangs. Many, though not all, were in state care at the time, and were failed by the very professionals they needed to look out for them. To understand how the government proposal would play out, picture the following: A children’s home in a deprived part of town. The home houses teenage girls — maybe 10 or 12 of them. A few care staff work in shifts. Abusers loiter around the home, waiting in cars nearby or sometimes even trying to enter the premises. Girls are enticed into cars, then driven off, probably to be raped. All this is happening right outside the home, in plain sight. Crucially, care staff know that it’s happening, but do nothing.
This is a scene I’ve heard described in thousands of hours of witness testimony over the last 20 years. It will be happening now. It’s the very situation a mandatory reporting law needs to address. Rather than care staff shrugging their shoulders, we want them to make a police report. Of course, we also need the police to act on this, but the existence of a formal report, made pursuant to legal requirements, makes police inaction harder.
But under the government “mandatory reporting” law, men acting suspiciously around the home does not trigger the duty to report. At this point the men aren’t visibly abusing the children so there is no witnessed abuse to report. The same applies to children getting into cars. At this point the children aren’t telling the staff what’s going to happen to them at the end of the taxi journey. The staff may know the likely outcome from experience; they almost certainly do. But since they aren’t being told explicitly by the children, there’s no duty to report it.
This is the absurdity of the government proposal. A core problem with the grooming gang cases is professionals having good grounds to suspect abuse is going on, but doing nothing. This proposal invites those very professionals to carry on exactly as before. We could have avoided this problem: a much better mandatory reporting proposal, drafted by the campaign group Mandate Now, covering reasonable suspicion and including a criminal sanction for non-reporting, was introduced into the House of Lords earlier this year by the crossbench peer Tanni Grey-Thompson. But it proceeded no further after being rejected by the government.
Assuming this passes, what we will have is a law designed entirely for show
Why has Labour done this? A few years ago, before Keir Starmer became an MP, I worked with him on his Labour Party victims’ law project. Its recommendations included a comprehensive mandatory reporting law, embracing reasonable suspicion. In the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, a slew of Labour politicians, including the current Home Secretary, proclaimed their support. The UK is unusual amongst Western countries in not having such a law, and efforts to introduce it over the past decade have foundered because of backstairs lobbying from teaching and social work unions.
Because IICSA recommended mandatory reporting, the government needed to look like it was acting. Yet again, however, its institutional backers insisted that it neuter the impact. Assuming this passes, what we will have is a law designed entirely for show, without any intention that it will make a material difference to the problem. A law, in fact, that almost literally embeds the turning of the blind eye into legislation.
