Child Sexual Exploitation (Rotherham)

Debate between Sarah Champion and Kevin Barron

Thursday 26th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Champion]

It would take a great deal for me to have faith in Ofsted and trust it to investigate and, indeed, support Rotherham council, given the failings that it has demonstrated not just in Rotherham but throughout the country. Ofsted needs to be much more aware when it is assessing councils and individual organisations in the context of child sexual exploitation and child abuse in general.

In the short term, there also needs to be a Rotherham-specific organisation that is dedicated to co-ordinating the witness statements that victims and survivors are asked to give. We currently have a ludicrous arrangement whereby the same young victim is asked to give evidence to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the National Crime Agency, and South Yorkshire police. That is hugely invasive, logistically demanding, and overwhelming for young people who are still trying to rebuild their lives.

We need a centre that can co-ordinate all of the interviews and questions so the victim needs only to speak to one person in a safe and supportive space. To facilitate this, I ask that the Minister funds a remote video link to enable a victim who is involved in a court hearing to give evidence from a remote location. That would help serve the needs of victims in Rotherham, enabling them to link into court proceedings without the trauma of attending court. This fact was highlighted as an issue for victims in the Jay report. There are challenges associated with delivering the initiative and the provision of defined funding to progress technological solutions would be beneficial.

To state the obvious, if we look after the victims and survivors we will get prosecutions. If we keep being demanding of their time as is happening currently, they will withdraw their good will and the case will be lost.

Another short-term Rotherham specific request is a dedicated Crown Prosecution Service team to provide timely pre-charge advice and progress cases. That would be a team of four or five CPS lawyers plus additional admin support to manage current and future cases effectively. Initial discussions have taken place and the suggested team size and cost has been provided by the CPS.

I also recommend that an additional independent sexual violence adviser, or ISVA, should be recruited, to be co-located with the public protection unit in Rotherham to offer support and advocacy for victims as they are identified. Alternatively, the ISVA could be community-based. The ISVA would need to be trained as a child ISVA and therefore be able to support child victims in both current and historical cases.

[Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a very good case. On her point about the CPS, I dealt with a case in 2003-04 that is still being investigated. It was with the CPS at that time, and they are a distance away from the borough. To echo another point, within the past hour, I spoke to the father of one of the victims who I have been in touch with for many years now who had a meeting this week with the police and crime commissioner, but setting up regular meetings to try to sort something out is hindered by the lack of income because of budget cuts for the PCC and Rotherham borough council. May I tell the Minister that we need help to sort this situation out?

[Sarah Champion]

I echo what my right hon. Friend says. In the CPS for South Yorkshire and the Humber, the Sheffield CPS has seven lawyers, each carrying a caseload of at least 100 individuals.

Finally, in Rotherham we have three voluntary counselling services trying to support all our survivors: Apna Haq, GROW and the women’s counselling service. Although it was welcome that Rotherham council gave each organisation £20,000 to fast-track child sexual exploitation cases, that is only until the end of the financial year. What is needed is long-term investment to enable them to work with victims and survivors in an intensive way and at the pace that the victims and survivors want.

In discussions with the police and crime commissioner, he has offered to be the fundholder for all the schemes I have outlined, as I am aware the Prime Minister was nervous about giving additional funding to the police or council.

I would now like to focus on what needs to happen nationally. We know that Rotherham is not an isolated case; it already follows high-profile cases of widespread sexual abuse in other towns and cities. The sexual exploitation of vulnerable teenagers is happening across the country. It is of grave concern that our statutory services are not in a fit position to respond consistently and convincingly. In addition, there is a serious shortfall, and inconsistencies, in the support provided to victims of child sexual abuse and exploitation that must be urgently addressed, from disclosure, through the criminal justice system and into therapeutic support for those who need it.

Research conducted in 2009, currently being updated by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, found there was a shortfall in therapeutic support for victims of sexual abuse of more than 50,000 places a year, a huge gap between need and service provision. Victims are subject to a postcode lottery with only one support programme for every 25,000 children in the UK. The 508 services that are available are so overstretched they are now being forced to stop taking on new cases.

On Monday, the shadow Home Secretary committed a Labour Government to creating a dedicated child protection unit. I urge the Government to do the same. This topic should be not about politics but about doing the best for our children. I would like to propose a five-point plan to tackle child sexual exploitation nationally. The first is the establishment of a national taskforce for organised child sexual exploitation, based on a similar model to the forced marriage unit or the modern day slavery commissioner. That would be a small, dedicated team of experts in policing, prosecuting and psychological support that can be used as a resource by police forces, councils and the voluntary sector if they suspect organised child sexual exploitation. If that taskforce had existed when the Jay report came out six months ago, the police and the council could have immediately had specialist support on how to work with the victims; best practice in securing prosecutions; setting up a dedicated investigation team; and how to manage communications.

In reality, the police and the council have been left to flounder for six months, learning by their mistakes rather than being supported through an intensely difficult time. When the Jay report clearly identified failings with the police and the council, why did the Government not offer immediate support? I welcome the intervention of commissioners now, but why could they not have been brought in much earlier, avoiding some of the mistakes that have been allowed to happen?

My second point is that we should introduce mandatory personal, social, health and economic education for key stage 1 children. This is about teaching children not about sex, but about what is, and is not, a healthy relationship. We need to give our children the tools to arm themselves against abuse, not leave them to discover the horrors of the internet and, in the absence of proper education, be forced to consider what they see there to be normal.

I would also like the Government to make it mandatory for anyone employed to work with children to have training in spotting the signs of child abuse and how to report concerns.

Fourthly, I am tired of professionals being more concerned about protecting data than about protecting the child. The Government need to send out a clear signal that there will be penalties if health and education services, local authorities and the police do not share information to prevent child abuse.

Finally, we need a culture where victims of child abuse are believed. In Rotherham, victims were trying to report their abuse for decades. They repeatedly had doors shut in their faces and were branded prostitutes, worthless or complicit. I say to the Minister that that culture has to change. It is slowly changing in cases of rape and domestic violence; it needs to quickly change in the case of child abuse.