Children and Vulnerable Adults: Abuse

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I also want to thank my noble friend Lady Walmsley for this debate. I particularly welcome the comments we have just heard from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, in relation to survivors, which is a theme that I hope to continue.

I speak as a police officer of over 30 years’ experience and someone who for a time was the national lead for the police on mental health issues. I also conducted a review of rape investigation for the Metropolitan Police in 2005. For me, there is a serious issue of concern about the police and the Crown Prosecution Service in relation to this area. Understandably for the CPS but, arguably, less so for the police, there is a focus on criminal prosecution. This can be problematic in relation to victims of abuse, particularly children and vulnerable adults. The problem becomes more acute when the alleged offence is conducted in private, where only the perpetrator and the victim are present, and there is no forensic or other evidence to substantiate the allegation. The problems become even more acute in cases of vulnerable adults in rape cases where consent is an issue.

Clearly, everything should be done to ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice for abuse of the vulnerable, but the conclusion we came to in the Metropolitan Police rape investigation review was that the needs of the victim should be primary and the need for a prosecution should be secondary. Even if, because of the vulnerability of the victim, a jury might be unlikely to believe the victim or the victim might be unable to accurately recall the event, if at all, the importance of those reporting abuse being believed by the police cannot be overstated.

As my noble friend Baroness Walmsley has said, we saw in the recent case of Jimmy Savile how vulnerable victims were either not believed or did not feel able to report the abuse until after the perpetrator was dead. Clearly, as a prosecuting authority, the CPS has a legal obligation to apply a test of how likely it is that the case will be proved; but the police have other and, I believe, overriding obligations to the victim and to society as a whole to ensure that vulnerable people and children are safeguarded.

In the past, police performance indicators, particularly in relation to clear-up rates, the proportion of crimes solved compared with the total number of offences recorded, has encouraged the police to concentrate on the most solvable cases and even to look for reasons not to record offences at all. It is much easier to influence the clear-up rate by not recording an offence than it is to try to solve very difficult and serious cases. Indeed, in the first draft of my review into rape investigations, we identified wide differences across London in the total number of offences recorded, the proportion that was classified as “no crime” or “not a crime”, and the proportion of successful prosecutions. We not only identified differences in leadership, the amount of resources and the expertise that was applied to those cases, but we also identified differences in how the vulnerability of the victim impacted on how seriously the police appeared to take the alleged offences.

In some areas of London prostitution was an issue, while in others there was a problem with those addicted to drugs, or a higher proportion of those who suffered from mental illness, and in those areas there appeared to be a higher incidence of crimes being written off as never having happened. While one can see the dilemma for the police in some of these cases, when the prospect of securing sufficient evidence to mount a successful prosecution may have been small and they were in effect presented with an unsolvable crime, that was no excuse for writing off such offences as simply never having happened.

The most important starting point in any police investigation—and one that appears not to have been followed, certainly in the era of Jimmy Savile—is that the child or vulnerable adult who complains of abuse must be believed unless there is compelling evidence to the contrary. Even if a prosecution does not prove possible, it is essential that at the very least the matter is recorded as a crime for police intelligence purposes and that steps are taken to ensure that the child or vulnerable adult is supported and protected from future harm.

There is also a need to act with fairness and balance towards the accused in these cases. We have seen other cases where serious allegations have been made against well known individuals, and in some of those cases the press appear to have assumed their guilt, even when those individuals have subsequently been acquitted or no further action has been taken against them by the police. I am not in favour of anonymity for those accused of sexual offences, but there needs to be a sea change in people’s attitudes towards police investigations in such cases.

The police may arrest someone if they have “reasonable cause to suspect” that a person has committed an offence, not because they have evidence that they can put before a court. The CPS may charge someone on the basis that it believes there to be a more than 51% chance of conviction before a jury, not because it is certain that the person is guilty. It seems that in the minds of the public in this country at the moment, rather than a presumption of innocence there is a presumption of “no smoke without fire”, which is very often planted by the media. In particular, there needs to be a balance between the need for a thorough police investigation and the innocent accused being bailed, rebailed, and bailed again.

The police appear to have to perform a very difficult balancing act, but I will try to simplify things. Children and vulnerable adults who have suffered abuse must be believed, cared for and protected at all costs. Whenever possible, perpetrators must be brought to justice—but not at any cost. Above, all inability to prosecute must never be an excuse for failing victims of abuse.