Survivors of Child Abuse

Debate between Lord Mann and Jim Shannon

Tuesday 17th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[John Mann]

It has been letting down the hon. Lady’s constituents and mine alike. Three girls were repeatedly raped from age 5 onwards. There is no case to answer, because their statements taken at the time, when they were young kids, do not add up. The Crown Prosecution Service said, “Oh, there is nothing we can do. We will not win in court.” What support is there for them? I will tell you what support there is: me. That is who they come to. I will give them support, but what I need from the state and national and local government is properly resourced mental health services that do not, as they did to my constituent, send people away—she needed to be sedated for three days, having made a statement about the multiple rape and other violence—and say, “Come back in a month’s time.” That happened in Nottinghamshire this year to one of the victims. Mental health services are totally disjointed when it comes to support.

I am dealing with children’s social services, but some of these adults are in their 50s or 60s. They will not be going to children’s social services, so where is the support from adult social services? There is no system in place that gives them that. I have constituents who have been hung out to dry by the police and given no support. They were not even referred to the support agencies, having come and said, “We were raped as children.” What on earth is going on when we have no support systems in place?

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very powerful case on behalf of victims of child abuse. In Northern Ireland in the past year, 50 offenders have been arrested and questioned in relation to sexual abuse. Does he feel that the first thing that survivors of child abuse want to see is the culprits arrested, investigated and referred to the courts for sentencing? Do resources need to be made available for that to happen?

[John Mann]

The survivors want justice, and the only way they will get that is by being believed and by perpetrators being prosecuted. The Crown Prosecution Service cannot cope with the volume. It has hardly any cases compared with the cases that will go to it. For the Crown Prosecution Service in the east midlands, we are talking about a manifold increase just from the cases I am bringing. How on earth do we expect such places as Rotherham to deal with the numbers? The expertise to take the cases forward is there, but the resource is not. What is being said is, “We will put it on the long drift for years and years.” That is what has happened with the police. They are not even getting to some of the people who should be questioned as potential perpetrators, because they do not have the resource to do that.

I am not criticising Government spending; what they spend on this, that and the other is a separate debate. It is important that we all get our heads around what is needed. We are not talking about the Government announcing another £100 million or £200 million here or there; we are talking about a far bigger resource than that. In my constituency, I am personally dealing with 25 victims—25 survivors of child abuse. That is so far. There are loads and loads more out there, just in my constituency.

The Crown Prosecution Service and the police cannot handle the prosecutions, the mental health services cannot handle the support services for the victims and social services cannot handle virtually anything to do with them. They do not have the resource. If we are to get on top of this huge legacy, we need to define what I put to the Minister as a Roll-Royce service. What does that mean? A standard needs to be put in place so that when someone comes forward, there is a benchmark that defines what they are entitled to. It is an entitlement. This man was forced into slavery and went to the police, and the police and the social workers returned him and his sisters to the abusers not once, not twice, not three times, but more. He did the right thing, and he is entitled to a Rolls-Royce service. That can come in different forms. What is his major demand? One-to-one literacy lessons, because he finds it a bit hard to get on, being unable to read and write because he was not in school because he was forced to work in a foundry by some predatory paedophile abuser who was the foster carer over him—and that is what they were. Literacy is the most important thing for him.

There is no system in place that says, “You will get this. You are entitled to this.” What is he meant to do—go to the civil courts, as so many thousands have already done? That is not a sensible approach, given that lawyers will not even share information, and are telling people in Nottinghamshire not to come to me, the media or anyone else. They say, “Stick with us, we’ll get you a little bit of money.” How much is a life worth in Nottinghamshire? Eight grand a settlement. It is not good enough, and it is not going to be good enough in future.

Whether under this Government or the next Government, whoever is in power in the next Parliament, whoever the Minister is, from whichever party, I need to see defined an immediately available Rolls-Royce service. Whatever resource is needed, we will have to find it. This is not about me getting up and having a go at the Government; it is about Parliament taking responsibility. This is about saying that a huge amount of the available resources needs to be given and broken down into different areas.

I have been contacted by constituents and many others from all over the country who have survived abuse. They want prosecutions to proceed. They want the police to be able to investigate. They want mental health and other NHS facilities and services to be available. They want support from adult social services. They need that, and they need it as they come forward.

There is one final thing that they need. The Government have made their decisions about the independent panel and Goddard. We can learn a lot from abroad. They do this stuff better in Scandinavia and New Zealand. We should be stealing all their best practice for how we deal with things. Whoever is the Minister, and whoever sits on the Select Committees and all the rest, should get out there, steal their good ideas, bring them back and implement them here. But survivors need their own forum. They have called for a national institute for people abused in childhood. They need that, because then they can provide some of the support and guidance, and they can contribute to the definition of a Rolls-Royce service.

I cannot be dealing with more people attempting suicide, having come to me because the support services are not there. I do not give a damn which heads are going to roll. If those support services are not there, I will get rid of the people at the top, because it is not good enough for my constituents, who are no different from people anywhere else.

I need from the Government a clear undertaking that the resources and expertise will be there. If someone has survived this trauma and lived with it all their life, they have a right to and an expectation of support when they bravely come forward. That is what we as a society and we as a Parliament are going to have to give them. That is why this debate is not only timely, but critical. We need action within months, not years.

Political and Human Rights (African Great Lakes)

Debate between Lord Mann and Jim Shannon

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Westminster Hall

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for the debate. I want to make four points. First, briefly, the Prime Minister in government has been keen to emphasise the Christian nature of the country and the Government. I had the opportunity, with the Bishop of Durham, other Church leaders and some parliamentarians, with the assistance of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, to visit the great lakes last summer. We were hosted by local Church leaders in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

The role of the Church, post-conflict—and, more critically, post-border—in reconstruction is one that the Government, in their international development and foreign affairs work, must build on. I will come on to Burundi in my fourth point, but there and in Rwanda we see Church leaders, from different ethnic minorities in each country, working alongside communities that have been in conflict in different and tragic ways more or less ever since independence. Whether we wish it or not, a critical element of our role is to assist in bringing together the Churches to work on the problems in the region. There are a variety of Churches; the Catholic Church is hosting a meeting today, and the Church of England has got a particular role in relation to the problems we are discussing, which I hope that the Government will capitalise on. The Church of England—not least in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire—has done an immense amount of work over many years to build links across the great lakes, not least in Burundi.

Secondly, I want to talk about the group that nobody seems to be dealing with, namely the Twa community. The Department for International Development, wrongly, does nothing about them; it has done nothing about them for many years, so that is a criticism not merely of any changes made by this Government, but of the continuing lack of priority given to the group. That community of former forest dwellers across the great lakes is small in number now. It was once great in number, but its members were murdered in greater numbers than anyone else under Belgian colonial rule; vast numbers of the Twa were murdered over the past century. Those who remain in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi are the most impoverished of the poor. They are the most disfranchised and the least represented. Having been removed from the forest for the benefits of nature conservation and western tourists—

[Jim Shannon]

And business.

[John Mann]

—and business, they have incredible levels of inter-communal violence, particularly sexual violence and rape, and they are struggling to cope with life outside the forest.

It is not for me to come up with or even to suggest solutions, other than to say that without question, DFID ought to give proper priority to projects working with the Twa, not least those that develop youth leadership and potential community leadership. There is some exciting church-led work in that area, which is creating new leaders for the future. That is vital if the Twa are to continue to exist and not disappear in what I would describe, I think accurately, as an assisted genocide—a genocide assisted by the inaction of everyone, both inside and outside the country. We share some responsibility for that. With our proud history of international development, such projects ought to be the kind of thing we are good at. It is rather shameful that over the past decade we have done nothing about the Twa in those countries.

Thirdly, other Members have already raised the attempts by SOCO, a UK-based oil exploration company, to plunder the reserves in the Virunga national park. I would make two points. I do not wish to be trite, but it is a fact that there are more parliamentarians in Britain than mountain gorillas in the wild. If we balloted our constituents on which they would like to preserve for the future, I suspect that parliamentarians would lose out, and lose out heavily. We have a responsibility to future generations. It must be cost-effective to preserve wildlife. There may well be roles for the Twa to play in that, for their economic livelihoods. After all, they are removed from the forest to allow tourists to visit the mountain gorillas and bring in hard currency.

The point is more fundamental than that for human beings. The national parks in the great lakes region are the natural borders and boundaries that, more than anything else, will preserve nation states and restrict cross-border conflicts. The Akagera national park between Rwanda and Tanzania is being rebuilt. It has an horrendous history from the genocide, but, as well as having income-generating potential for the country, it serves as a natural brake on cross-border issues. The Volcans national park in the north-west corner of Rwanda, the Virunga and others serve a similar purpose. The preservation of such natural borders and the wildlife they contain is therefore ethically right and economically sensible for the long term—for tourism and livelihoods in 50, 100 or 150 years, not just the profits for SOCO or whatever in the next 10 or 20 years. Such preservation is critical to these countries’ competitive advantage, but also to minimising conflict now and in future. That should be seen as part of our foreign policy and international development work, and be given much higher strategic priority.

Fourthly and finally, I want to make a slightly longer point about Burundi, which is 178th out of the 187 countries assessed by the UN for poverty; it is not the poorest, but it is virtually the poorest country in the world. The UN says that Burundi is likely to achieve one out of the 18 millennium development goals. That is beyond the scale of most countries. For a post-conflict country with such a level of poverty to go without support from this country—here I will criticise this Government—is, whatever the reason, a mistake that must be reversed by whoever is in power after 2015. We must stop our lack of engagement with Burundi on international development.

I know that the Minister is a good man and a good Minister, in my experience. I do not normally give even the most modest praise to Tories, but he is a good man and has been, in my view, a good Minister. As he has been to Burundi, I would like to hear about his experience; perhaps he might like to give us his recommendations about how the Government should relate to that country, because it is applying for Commonwealth status. I hope that the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association will engage with Burundi on not just a parliamentary but an official level, and on a more intense basis. We should be in there, assisting a country that is increasingly looking to the English language, to the Commonwealth—not least because of the trade links with east Africa—and to us. There is a lot that we can offer.

Many criticisms can rightly be levelled at Burundi. It is not exactly a pluralistic democracy of the highest calibre. Currently, there is not the freedom of media and non-governmental organisations that we would want and expect. However, Burundi has had the most successful repatriation of displaced people in recorded history. More than 1 million refugees have returned, without civil war breaking out, and reintegrated into one of the world’s poorest economies. Although there have been, and remain, issues of land disputes and so on, on balance the process has been incredibly successful compared with any other such mass movement of people back into a country after they had been driven out by civil war. Many second-generation Burundians were born in Tanzania but have returned to their historic roots, sometimes with elderly family, sometimes without. That has been handled extraordinarily well. We should praise them for that, but we should also be in there with them.

The people of Burundi have recovered from what was an almost hidden war, certainly in the western media, in which as many people were killed as in Rwanda, over a longer period and with some of the same ethnic conflict bases. If any of that had ever been reported by the western media, people in this country would have been jumping up and down. But it was a secret civil war in a country that no one had ever heard of and that very few people across the world and in Britain have heard of. Yet Burundi has come out of that conflict, so we should be there using our great expertise in pluralist democracy and in building up civil society and its institutions. We have expertise in how the Churches can contribute to that process, because they—not least the Church of England—already play a significant part in what is happening in Burundi, and I would say a positive one.

There are many reasons why modest investment by DFID and better engagement—including by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—would pay great dividends for us, for Burundi and for the great lakes region. I hope that the Minister will give some encouraging signs that this country will re-engage. If this Government do not, I want to put on the record for whoever is in power after 2015 the fact that this demand will not go away. We should re-engage, DFID should re-engage, and our diplomatic staff should be in Burundi, representing us and assisting the country.