Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

Debate between Kevin Barron and Sarah Champion

Wednesday 22nd May 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Champion]

I completely agree with those sentiments. It is a blessing that MPs such as the hon. Gentleman fight for people when they need it, but it should not come down to an MP fighting for an individual. They pay their taxes. We have a duty to support them. That support should be accessible to everyone as an automatic right.

Survivors told our inquiry that the impact of trauma caused by childhood sexual abuse is not widely recognised by professionals, which can make it hard to get the support they need. One survivor described visiting a GP as

“a lottery as to which kind of help they will get”

and said that there is a

“lack of diagnosis and failure to understand the significance of the disclosure…many survivors are misdiagnosed with lower level issues such as anxiety and depression.”

Survivors feel that the effects of the abuse are not well known in the NHS. Frontline staff are not equipped to deal with disclosures, and they do not have the knowledge to direct survivors to appropriate treatments. It is telling that, although 89% of survivors said that their mental health had been negatively affected by abuse, only 16% said that NHS mental health services had met their needs. Another survivor told our inquiry:

“I’m a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and of the mental health system.”

Recent studies have found that a wide range of social and environmental factors increase the risk of mental ill health, including growing up in poverty, early separation from parents and experiencing sexual abuse as a child. Professor Richard Bentall at the University of Sheffield has argued that the evidence of a link between childhood trauma and a future psychiatric disorder is at least as strong as the evidence of genetic causes. Solid evidence also shows that adverse childhood experiences can affect the brain structure, which then affects a person’s sensitivity to stressful situations and causes fluctuations in mood throughout adulthood. That has significant ramifications for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

Survivors of childhood sexual abuse have two cards dealt against them. Because the trauma of the abuse increases their risk of developing psychiatric disorders later in life, their risk of experiencing adverse conditions as an adult also increases. The findings of that research were borne out by our surveys, which demonstrated survivors’ experiences of poor relationships, unemployment and financial hardship.

Survivors need the professionals they interact with, whether they are child protection social workers, jobcentre work coaches, GPs or judges, to be curious about the circumstances that led to their current predicament, rather than just dealing with the presenting symptoms. Survivors told the inquiry they want frontline professionals to ask not, “What’s wrong with you?” but, “What happened to you?”. That professional curiosity will allow survivors to build relationships with professionals that are oriented to meeting their needs. It is key to achieving quality support and, ultimately, securing justice. Will the Minister commit to developing guidance and training on trauma-informed practice for frontline professionals, in conjunction with the specialist voluntary sector and his colleagues across Departments?

Survivors told the APPG that the support they found most important to their recovery is specialist voluntary sector counselling and therapy; I will shorten this to “specialist services” for the rest of the debate. Specialist services provide a range of options tailored to meet the needs of the survivor, including counselling, support groups and advocacy. Survivors say they value these services for a wide range of reasons: the services provide them with support regardless of whether they report to police; they are met by knowledgeable staff in a welcoming, non-clinical environment; and the staff recognise that there is nothing intrinsically “wrong” with them and that the issue is the effects of the trauma caused by the abuse.

We need to continue to develop what we know about child sexual abuse, its links to mental illness, and the most effective forms of support and therapies for survivors. The APPG wants the National Institute of Health Research to commission studies into effective therapies for survivors of abuse and I urge the Minister to support us in that aim.

The inquiry heard that specialist services face unprecedented demand without a related increase in their budgets. SurvivorsUK reported a 30% year-on-year increase in people attempting to access its services in each of the last three years. In 2017, the National Association for People Abused in Childhood—NAPAC—answered 8,500 calls and emails on its national support helpline, but that is less than a tenth of the 90,000 inquiries that it received that year.

[Sir Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and I congratulate her on securing the debate. She has mentioned one issue that we Rotherham MPs are all too aware of—without the proper services to support these people, justice will not be brought through the courts. If we look at the number of people who the Jay report says were abused, we can see that the number of people who come forward is far, far fewer than that, and without these types of services we will not get these people the justice that they deserve, and they all deserve justice.

[Sarah Champion]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend, and I congratulate him, because as a Rotherham MP he has been an absolutely tireless campaigner, both to get justice for the survivors in Rotherham and to get the support services, which we are still waiting for.

The APPG’s inquiry into adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse found that the average male survivor waited for 26 years before disclosing abuse. Therefore, it cannot be right that, at the moment survivors are ready to speak about their abuse, they are forced to join the back of a queue, with waiting lists a year long, and sometimes waiting lists are closed, due to demand and the lack of funding to meet it. Across the country, the reality for survivors is a lengthy wait for support, or limits on the number of sessions available.

Although it was welcome that the Ministry of Justice increased by 10% the rape support fund, which provides grants to specialist sexual violence support services, specialist services are seeing demand increase far in excess of 10%.

Children’s Social Care: Rotherham

Debate between Kevin Barron and Sarah Champion

Tuesday 5th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the chance to hold this debate because I need the Minister to hear about and understand the unique situation facing Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council with regard to children’s services. The debate is also timely, as we have just debated the local government finance report.

I am sure the Minister agrees that there is no more important topic to be debated than the safeguarding of children and securing them a positive future. Local authorities up and down the country are struggling to fund their children’s social care services in the light of cuts since 2010, and Rotherham is no different. In real terms, the funding for Rotherham’s budget since 2013-14 has been reduced by 74%—a cut of more than £62 million. The Government have told councils such as Rotherham that they are making “significant additional resources” available to support children’s social care, but that funding is primarily for innovation and does not redress the shortfall in core funding affecting so many local authorities.

The depletion in available resources has been compounded by a rising demand for children’s social care services. Rotherham council has experienced a dramatic rise in demand since 2015. There has been a significant increase in the number of children in receipt of statutory social work intervention at all levels—children in need, child protection and children in care. Nationally, the number of child protection inquiries has increased by 158% in 10 years, from 77,000 in 2007-08 to 198,000 in 2017-18.

Like other authorities across the country, Rotherham has experienced a significant increase in demand. In Rotherham, as of December 2018, the number of children on a child protection plan was 562, and the number of children in need was 1,447. In Rotherham, the number of children in care has risen from 407 children in March 2015 to 634 in December 2018, well above the national average increase. Rotherham has experienced the third highest increase in numbers in 2017-18 out of 152 local authorities in England. Let us remember that the average annual cost of care, based on placement cost alone, for a looked-after child in Rotherham is £54,000 per child.

A significant contribution to this dramatic increase is the impact of Operation Stovewood, the National Crime Agency investigation into past child sexual exploitation in Rotherham by grooming gangs. The investigation is unique, and it is the largest operation the NCA has ever carried out.

[Sir Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will remember that in May last year I stood up at Prime Minister’s Question Time and asked the Prime Minister about further funding bid for Fusion, which had only 30% of the original funding. This bid is to help to support the survivors of CSE and to pursue convictions against the perpetrators. Is it her understanding, as it is mine, that no further Fusion project money has gone into Rotherham?

Child Sexual Exploitation (Rotherham)

Debate between Kevin Barron and Sarah Champion

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.