Child Protection

Debate between Meg Munn and Ann Coffey

Thursday 12th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who as children’s Minister responded positively to the parliamentary inquiry into children who go missing from care, which was conducted by the all-party group for runaway and missing children and adults and supported by the Children’s Society. I am pleased to support his call for an overarching inquiry.

Over the past 20 years, we have had numerous high-profile inquiries and serious case reviews after children have been harmed, abused and killed. Almost without exception, those inquiries and reviews have come to the same conclusions—poor inter-agency working, sharing of information and communication were significant factors in failures to prevent the child’s injury or death. There is a public frustration that time and again recommendations point to the same failings in the system.

It seems that a lot of reviews and inquiries look at the failures of the organisations around the child rather than putting the child’s voice and experience at the centre of the review. I recently looked at a systems review of CSE practice by Stockport’s children’s safeguarding board through the eyes of a victim. I was struck that on a number of occasions her case was closed because she withdrew her co-operation. She would not communicate. Surely a better way would have been to find someone capable of talking to her and winning her trust, which could then have prevented the harm that subsequently happened to her.

Listening to the children who gave evidence to our inquiry, it was clear that children felt that they had not been, and were not being, listened to. One of the key challenges facing agencies charged with safeguarding children is being able to communicate properly with children, so that they feel able to talk about what is happening to them. I agree with the Children’s Commissioner, Maggie Atkinson, that staff who work with children and young people, from whichever discipline or profession, should experience a common set of training that crosses all boundaries. Unless we can communicate with children, we will not know what is going on in their lives and therefore we will not be able to prevent them from coming to harm.

Sadly, all too often, that essential communication with children does not happen and we find out all too late about the horrors of the experience that those children have been subjected to, which they then have to relive as witnesses in our courts. There is widespread concern about the treatment of child witnesses in the court system. The failures to provide sufficient support to child witnesses are based on an inadequate understanding of how to communicate with children.

No one should be in any doubt about how much children worry about going to court. Many children express those fears to the NSPCC’s ChildLine. I will read out just one example. One girl said:

“I have to go to court this week to give evidence and I really don’t want to. I didn’t want to report the abuse but I was told I had to. It just feels like everything’s my fault and I wish I had never told anyone.”

I welcome the new guidelines issued by Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, on cases involving child sexual abuse, which he said would ensure that the focus was on allegations made by victims, rather than their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. However, I fear that we are a long way from that in the way witnesses are cross-examined in our courts now.

The Government are making progress in piloting section 28 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, which will allow pre-recorded cross-examination of young and vulnerable witnesses. That is very welcome.

I recently tabled a series of parliamentary questions which revealed that in the first three months of 2013 registered intermediaries were requested for children in only 16% of cases. This indicates to me that the police, the prosecution, the defence and the courts do not really understand how difficult it is for children to communicate in the current adversarial system and do not understand the need for registered intermediaries to facilitate communication between them and the court.

Interestingly enough, in spite of all the publicity surrounding witnesses who have been called liars and fantasists and subjected to aggressive cross-questioning by multiple lawyers, I understand that there have been barely any complaints to the Bar Council, which indicates the acceptance and normalisation of aggressive, adversarial cross-examinations.

I have been reading with interest the work done by academic experts such as Professor John Spencer of Cambridge university and Joyce Plotnikoff about the need to reform the rules and conventional practice in the cross-examination of children. I would like the Minister to consider establishing a commission of inquiry made up of expert judges and leading academics into reforming the rules on cross-examination of children after the spate of recent high-profile sex trials in which lawyers branded vulnerable victims liars again and again.

Of course the right of the defendant to a fair trail and to examine fairly the witnesses against him or her must be sacrosanct, but the process has to be about obtaining the best quality of evidence in a way that is robust, reliable and safe for the witness. As Lord Justice Auld said in his review of the criminal courts:

“A criminal trial is not a game under which a guilty defendant should be provided with a sporting chance.”

Currently, the court appears to be set up as a theatre, in which lawyers perform for the benefit of the jury. Sometimes it does not seem like a real cross-examination of evidence, but to be about smearing and breaking down the witness to get defendants off the hook. One senior English barrister told Dr Emily Henderson, a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge and a criminal barrister herself who is doing a six-month study of the impact of changes to cross-examination, that:

“You are always really playing to the audience. Of course, it is one-on-one in that there is only one person answering questions, but you are constantly aiming everything at the people who are ultimately going to be making the decision. So you are playing to the gallery.”

Another barrister told Dr Henderson:

“I have three speeches: my opening, my closing and my cross-examination.”

Barristers in sex abuse cases must be stopped from manipulating child witnesses like puppets.

As many leading academics, including Spencer and Plotnikoff, have said, 30-plus years of empirical research in this and similar adversarial jurisdictions has shown again and again that conventional cross-examination is more likely to confuse and mislead children than to draw out accurate and reliable evidence. Indeed, research by the NSPCC showed that more than 90% of children under 10 do not understand the questions they are asked in court. The commission that I am proposing could also consider what further measures might be undertaken to improve the safety and reliability of processes for the taking and investigation of children’s evidence by the criminal courts. In addition, it could examine extending the role of registered intermediaries to allow them to cross-examine vulnerable witnesses under the direction of counsel. This idea was first raised more than 20 years ago in the 1989 Pigot committee report, which recommended that advocates’ questions should be relayed through a specialist child examiner, such as a paediatrician, child psychiatrist, social worker or other person who enjoys the child’s confidence.

In most other continental jurisdictions, including France, Germany, Austria, Norway and Italy, young child witnesses are questioned by a neutral specialist. The interviewer investigates issues that the defence wants raised and consults the defence in the process.

I was heartened that in 2010 and 2011 the Court of Appeal released several judgments designed to clean up poor cross-examination techniques. The court was very clear that cross-examiners must use language appropriate to the developmental stage of the witness. However, despite these encouraging comments from the Court of Appeal, how we treat children in court is still a massive problem. In the last couple of weeks, we had the judge who described a 13-year-old victim of abuse as predatory. This was in addition to one of the barristers in the Oxford case accusing one of the girls of being a serial liar and fantasist who had fabricated the allegations, and a witness in the Stafford trial had to endure being called a liar day after day.

[Meg Munn]

There was a lot of condemnation of that at the time, with the Prime Minister and others saying that those remarks should not have been made, but does my hon. Friend agree that we should be worried not that such remarks are being made but that people in these positions believe these things in the first place about children?

[Ann Coffey]

I agree. Attitudes to children in our society are quite awful sometimes. That manifests itself in various ways.

Children’s charities and victim support groups said that the Staffordshire trial shamed British justice. These cases demonstrate the urgent need for reform. I hope that the Minister will agree with me that a commission to look into further reforms of the practice of cross-examination is the only way to ensure that in the future we get the best possible evidence, without which the courts cannot do justice to the victim or the defendant.