Child Sexual Exploitation

Ann Coffey Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) on her excellent speech today, and on the major part she is playing in the Home Affairs Committee’s ongoing inquiry into localised child grooming.

This debate is taking place following unprecedented publicity about child sexual exploitation and an abundance of high-profile and shocking cases. One of the most shocking facts is that we still do not know the extent of child sexual exploitation in this country. In Greater Manchester we have a very proactive police force. We currently have more than 50 police officers dedicated solely to working full time on child sexual grooming investigations; we have 72 more dedicated to rape allegations, including child rape, and 60 more on “inter-familial” abuse, which includes sexual offences against children.

Detectives are investigating three more major alleged incidents involving young girls after doubling the number of officers investigating claims of abuse. It brings the total number of recently completed or ongoing investigations into the abuse of teenage girls to six. Nine more men from Rochdale are due to appear in court in the coming weeks following the conviction of nine others in May, and a trial is due to start at Manchester Crown court in January involving a similar investigation which involves girls from my constituency of Stockport.

I take the opportunity to congratulate Greater Manchester police on their dedication in bringing to justice the perpetrators of these horrendous crimes, but I point out to the Minister that these investigations take a lot of resources, and more resources will be needed in the future if we are serious about tackling child sexual exploitation.

So the debate is very timely and takes place against the background of a series of fast-moving events. More than a dozen inquiries of various types have been announced recently into allegations of child sex abuse, amid ongoing concerns that authorities have not taken the claims of victims seriously enough. Over the past 20 years we have seen more than 32 public inquiries into all aspects of public life; in relation to children they included the inquiries into the Soham murders, Victoria Climbié, and north Wales care homes. From all those inquiries we are awash with a sea of recommendations. Some have been implemented, such as improved safeguarding measures to protect children, including enhanced criminal record checks introduced by the last Labour Government. Other recommendations have not.

I was recently struck by the comments of Lord Levy, who chaired the Staffordshire pindown inquiry reporting in 1991, which looked into the practice of keeping children in pindown rooms for weeks and months. Lord Levy, reflecting on what had happened to his recommendations at a later date, said:

“The recommendations resulting from the Pindown Inquiry were variously acted upon, watered down, or ignored.”

I was also interested to read Lord Laming’s 2009 report into progress since the Climbié inquiry in 2001, which made more than 100 recommendations. On inter-agency working, he said that

“it is evident that the challenges of working across organisational boundaries continue to pose barriers in practice”.

I think that meant that things were not getting much better.

Better inter-agency working has been among the recommendations of many inquiries, including the parliamentary inquiry into children missing from care, which was conducted by the all-party group for looked-after children and care leavers and the all-party group for runaway and missing children and adults, which I chair. We found that the police and the Department for Education were not even collecting the same data on children missing from care, so that repeated missing episodes—one of the key indicators that sexual abuse might be taking place—were not being acted upon and children were being placed at risk of sexual exploitation.

Local safeguarding children boards are key to preventing sexual exploitation. They should be ensuring that local agencies are working effectively together, sharing information from health, police, schools and youth services to identify children who may be at risk and developing interventions to keep children safe and to stop them becoming victims of sexual exploitation. But we are a long way from that in many parts of the country, so children are facing a postcode lottery in protection from sexual exploitation.

I am very pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) accepted our recommendations and I am very sorry to have seen him go. I look forward to the actions proposed by the DFE and the Home Office in response, so that in future data on missing children will be collected in such a way that it is a useful tool in identifying children at risk of sexual exploitation. I have to say that one of the concerns, however, is the new definition of missing. It is important that the new Association of Chief Police Officers guidance has enough safeguarding procedures so that the significance of repeated absences that are not recorded as missing is not overlooked and underplayed. We all know that repeated absences are an indicator that a child may be being sexually exploited on a regular basis.

I also think it is important that Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary makes the inspection of police forces’ performance in this area a priority. I know this is a difficult and complex area, and that procedures or statutory guidance are by themselves not enough, although it is not acceptable when they are ignored. There is a statutory obligation for police forces to return missing statistics to the Missing Persons Bureau and yet it was only last year that all police forces returned their statistics to the bureau. So the Minister can appreciate our concern to ensure that all police forces take that seriously.

To return to Lord Levy, he said:

“We really need to bolster the procedures for ensuring that the lessons and recommendations from often expensive inquiries are carried through and actually acted upon.”

I agree, and I think before any more new inquiries are announced we should certainly find a way of reviewing recommendations of past inquiries.

I think that the Children’s Commissioner, in her newly strengthened role as a voice and advocate for children, should be given responsibility for ensuring that the recommendations of any future public inquiries relating to children are implemented and that she should report regularly to Parliament on progress towards their implementation. That might have the additional benefit of stopping the Government’s announcing of public inquiries simply to deal with the immediate pressure to solve a difficult problem. It is one thing for a Government to announce an inquiry when they know that they can kick any recommendations into the long grass; it is quite another when they might be held to account for those recommendations.

Since 2007 there have been 557 serious case reviews, although not all have been the result of child sexual exploitation. It is not clear to me what actually happens to the recommendations of those reviews, besides sitting with the local safeguarding children board. Recommendations relating to sexually exploited children in one area need to be learnt by local safeguarding children boards everywhere. After all, they serve as local inquiries. In the same way that the implementation of recommendations from public inquiries should be monitored, I believe that the recommendations from serous case reviews should be monitored, and perhaps that should be done by the Children’s Improvement Board. I also believe that a serious case review should always be undertaken if a child has been harmed by sexual exploitation, which is not currently the case.

Throughout all the inquiries and investigations into child sexual exploitation, we hear that children feel that they are not listened to. I believe that, above all else, we must strengthen their voice. That was the main message of the young people from one of the Children’s Society’s local projects when they gave evidence to our all-party group’s inquiry into children who go missing from care. It is a depressingly familiar story in most sexual abuse cases. The victims felt powerless, and one of our findings was that the professionals who were there to help them treated them as troublesome, a nuisance and a drain on resources, rather than as victims. That theme ran through the hugely important report from Barnardo’s, “Puppet on a string”, published in January 2011, which said that too often the tell-tale signs that a child was being abused were overlooked.

Children feel that their voice is not being heard, but often it is also those with responsibility for protecting them who do not want to listen. It is hard to listen, because that means having to act—and that might make life uncomfortable. We must strengthen the voice of children themselves. In our society, adults talk a lot about our rights, which in many cases do not exist, but we mean the right to a voice—our voice. I welcome the proposals to strengthen the role of the Children’s Commissioner, but she cannot be the voice of all children at all times and in all situations. Children used to be seen and not heard, and now they are sometimes heard. Somehow, we must move on so that they are always heard.

I strongly support compulsory sex and relationship education in schools, which is the Labour’s party’s policy. If children are to speak out, they must first feel confident that what is happening to them is wrong, and that is why sex and relationship education in schools is so important. They need to know—indeed, they are entitled to know—about issues such as sexual consent, what sexual coercion and exploitation is and how to shape healthy relationships and respect for each other, as well as to be alerted to signs that they are being sexually groomed. That will give them the confidence to reject inappropriate relationships, which is important in relation not only to grooming by older men for sexual exploitation, but to sexually coercive relationships by peers.

We know that harmful attitudes and behaviours are developed at a young age, and there is growing evidence about the impact of pornography on boys’ attitudes to girls. It is a problem that boys are accessing adult websites that give them a distorted attitude. It gives them a sense of entitlement, which means that they might touch a girl inappropriately and use bullying or coercive behaviour. That may explain the findings of a recent YouGov poll conducted by the Schools Safe 4 Girls campaign, in which a third of 16 to 18-year-old girls said they had been touched inappropriately at school.

Peer-on-peer exploitation is a very difficult issue, and the report by the Deputy Children’s Commissioner on gang and peer-on-peer sexual exploitation is due later this month. The perpetrators themselves are children, and that is an even more powerful reason for compulsory sex and relationship education in schools to balance what many boys see on adult websites. Boys need to be supported to form positive and respectful attitudes to girls and women. They need to understand that abuse can have a long-lasting impact, and not only physical, mental and emotional harm, but damage to a girl’s education and future.

Of course we need better inter-agency working and a better job to be done by local safeguarding children boards, but we also need to give children the knowledge to protect themselves. There is good practice around, and I am delighted about how sex and relationship education is being delivered in Stockport primary and secondary schools. Workshops, funded by Stockport council and Comic Relief, on sexual bullying and unhealthy relationships are being delivered in all local secondary schools by Stockport without Abuse, formerly the Stockport Women’s Aid group. The workshops are now being extended to year 6 pupils in primary schools in the borough and a new project will start at the end of this month that involves training young people to become “peer educators” to raise awareness of sexual harassment. The project involves Stockport council’s safeguarding unit, the Brinnington education achievement partnership and Stockport Without Abuse.

After my parliamentary debate on sexting last year, I was invited to see a film produced by two pupils at Harrytown high school. It was based on real-life situations and showed the consequences of uploading or texting indecent images. It is very important that we involve young people in that kind of work, as they will listen to other young people better than they will listen to adults. The more information children and young people receive in schools to prepare them for the world they face, the better, but that is not being done everywhere. We all know that knowledge is power, and power is what victims of sexual abuse throughout the ages have sadly lacked. Well-informed, confident children with a strong voice are less likely to become victims.

In conclusion, it is important that we learn the lessons of the past and understand the risks that children will be exposed to in the future. Only then will we be able to make significant headway in protecting children from sexual exploitation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Browne]

I am grateful for that intervention, in which an important point was raised. Of course, changes have been made to try to make it easier for victims to tell the truth in court, but we will look again at what further improvements can be made and I shall share that request with Ministers across the Department.

Finally, let me mention what we are doing about the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) about the strong link between children who go missing and child sexual exploitation. Research has shown that children are more likely than adults to go missing, placing them in risky situations, increasing their vulnerability to a range of issues and, as we are increasingly aware, placing many of those vulnerable young people at greater risk of child sexual exploitation. As children are particularly vulnerable to harm and exploitation while missing, the Government have put in place a tailored response to missing children issues by transferring responsibility for national missing children services to CEOP from 1 July 2011. We wish to see further improvements in work in that area.

In conclusion, let me reiterate—

[Ann Coffey]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Browne]

I will not, because of the strictures put in place by Mr Deputy Speaker.

Let me reiterate the Government’s commitment to tackle child sexual exploitation head on and to ensure that those that have suffered abuse can come forward knowing that action will taken. As my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said in her statement to the House on 6 November: “If you have been a victim of child abuse and you go to the police about what you have been through, people in positions of authority and responsibility should not and will not shirk their duty to support you.” That is our strong message today in this important debate and I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to it.