Children: Sexual Abuse

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, on securing this debate and on her effective introduction to it.

To understand debates about child sex abuse now we absolutely have to have some historical context. I started working on this issue some 30 or so years ago now. That was a time of denial, both here and in the United States, let alone elsewhere. Cases of widespread abuse were coming to light in churches, in orphanages, in hospitals and in the family, but a veritable smokescreen was thrown up to try to block off the implications of all this. For example, people spoke of false memory syndrome, casting doubt on the testimony of many children who did at that time speak up. In a way, that is not surprising because we are dealing here with some of the most cherished institutions in our society. A substantial proportion of the cases of sexual abuse that came to light were against small boys. It is important to recognise this and not concentrate only on sexual abuse against girls.

I used to teach at the University of California at Santa Barbara—one of the most beautiful towns you could possibly live in. The jewel in the crown in Santa Barbara was the mission, which stood on the hill above the town—a really wonderful building. In that building, it was discovered that there was a long-term history of sexual abuse on a mass scale. A local newspaper referred to those involved, who were priests and friars in the institution, as sacred monsters. Over the period 1964 to 1987, fully one-quarter of the friars regularly abused the boys in the institution.

Noble Lords may have seen in the papers a couple of days ago that high-profile cases are even now coming to the fore in the Catholic Church in Poland involving some very high-ranking dignitaries. What we are talking about here is, as it were, the secret sexual history of our civilisation. We are talking about something deep-rooted, not a transient phenomenon; it has a very long history. The term “grooming”, for example, has been widely used recently. It is a fairly novel term, but I can assure noble Lords that it is a term for a very traditional practice. Grooming went on at the mission in Santa Barbara as in so many other institutions. Many questions are raised, therefore, by what has been called our Jimmy Savile moment. In some part, it is our moment of institutional discovery and the consequences will take a long time to assimilate.

I have three brief points on which I would like the Minister, if he has time, to comment. First, I hope the Government will accept that we are in this for the long haul; that we are at the beginning of a process that will go on for a long time. Operation Yewtree, after all, found 450 people who came forward to speak out. None of them had spoken out before. This is part of a much larger hidden history; it is not an individual case in any way at all. Therefore, a long-term strategy is needed.

Secondly, would the Minister agree that we need to focus on boys as much as girls? Boys on the whole are much more reluctant than girls to speak up, for well known reasons. Jimmy Savile’s victims included quite a number of boys under the age of 10, so it will not do to concentrate only on one sex when discussing this issue.

Thirdly, we need to hammer home the point made by Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, that this is not just a problem for the CPS and the police. That is precisely because it is essentially an institutional problem—an issue, in other words, for all of those in charge of the diversity of organisations within which such practices have been carried on.