Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse: Final Report

Laura Farris Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Grant Shapps]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. One problem with tackling child sexual abuse is that it can happen in so many different settings and environments that it is difficult to have one central location always to deal with it. But what we can do is provide the services, expertise and some of the different initiatives I referred to in my comments to help bring that support. I absolutely agree with him and I am determined to do that, on behalf of all the children who have been abused and to prevent further abuse in future.

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

I, too, pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) for establishing the inquiry, and to Professor Jay for her report. I know something about how difficult and painstaking the evidence-gathering exercise was, because I was a barrister on the inquiry for a year in 2017. From Dolphin Square to the Catholic Church, from young offenders institutes to residential schools, the findings of the inquiry reveal the extent of prolonged child abuse, often in places where children were meant to be kept safe. Repeatedly it was found that if they complained about it, they were accused of lying or were even blamed for it happening in the first place.

There are multiple lessons from the report, but I would like to ask my right hon. Friend about the specific findings in relation to sexual predators—paedophiles—who travel overseas to abuse children. The report finds that civil orders restricting foreign travel are often underused and ineffective, because they only prohibit travel to a named country, which means that the perpetrator can circumvent that restriction by taking a different route. Will he say what the Home Office is doing to tighten up the restrictions in that area specifically?

[Grant Shapps]

First, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for her work in 2017—these cannot have been easy pieces of legal work to do. She is right to say that it is never the fault of the victims and we need to make sure that the response from officialdom is never to disbelieve and never to blame the victim either. She raises an important point about the narrow scope of those civil orders. We will certainly be undertaking to look at those and how they could operate much more efficiently.