18 August 2016
The Child Sexual Abuse Inquiry
Saving something from the wreckage.
By John Watson
Another disaster: another enquiry. Last week saw the publication of the Chilcot enquiry into the war in Iraq. It ran to more than 1 million words and related to events which occurred more than ten years ago. There was an initial flurry of attention and then, when it was seen that nobody was likely to be impeached or prosecuted, the public moved on to more significant news and the results of the whole enormous exercise were pushed out of the press.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse also promises to be a mammoth undertaking and it has got off to a particularly bad start. After initial difficulties in finding a sufficiently independent chairman, a New Zealand judge, Justice Lowell Goddard, was appointed. She resigned her position before any evidence was heard and has now been replaced by Alexis Jay, already a committee member and a very eminent expert on social work at the practical and policy levels. Without wishing in anyway to impugn the fitness of Ms Jay for the task, such a change at this stage sends a bad message in what seems likely to become a bad process. The very fact that an interim report is required in 2018 merely emphasises the baleful fact that by the time the final report emerges more years will have passed and more of those involved will be dead. Perhaps then it is worth looking at this enquiry and asking why it already seems to be in trouble.
The terms of the IICSA enquiry (it had become known as the Goddard enquiry but that name is presumably out of date) are extremely broad and can be found on the IICSA website. They are also a little misleading. Take this summary from the site itself:
“We will identify institutional failings where they are found to exist. We will demand accountability for past institutional failings. We will support victims and survivors to share their experience of sexual abuse. And we will make practical recommendations to ensure that children are given the care and protection they need.”
That is all unexceptional enough but the emphasis is odd. Why is it “institutional failings” which are targeted? The history of child sex abuse is a litany of failings. There are those in authority who did nothing out of laziness. There are those who neglected pleas for help. There are those who decided that preventing abuse was less important than maintaining relations with certain ethnic groups. Others were simply mistaken and did not realise what was going on. The point is, however, that all these decisions, omissions and accidental errors of judgement were not just failures by institutions: they were also failures by individuals. It will be no comfort to those abused if the final report contains criticism of institutions, no doubt accompanied by the normal ritual apologies, but the individuals who made the fateful decisions are spared criticism.
It is here that the two functions of the committee can get confused. One, and it is a right and proper one, is to give individuals who have been abused the chance to air their grievances in public and to place blame for the way in which things were covered up. Where those grievances are against particular men and women, those men and women must be singled out and not just the institutions for whom they worked at the time. In reality that is the most important function in the enquiry.
The second function is to find lessons. “It must not happen again” the report will thunder and then there will follow a battery of recommendations to avoid repetition. We don’t need to wait for publication to guess what these will be. There will be requirements that various agencies work together. There will be one or two overarching committees to see that they do so. Of course there will be extra protection for whistleblowers in line with the current fashion and perhaps some centralised register on which all complaints of a particular sort should be filed so that the authorities can search for patterns. Then of course there will be training, lots of that. A little of it will be useful but most of it will be about box ticking which, as always, will end up replacing the personal responsibilities of individual officials.
Then there are things which won’t be there and we can guess at those too. Root and branch reform of recruitment to bring more middle class people into the police and broaden their outlook will not be on the list. Nor will the suggestion that the whole approach taken by the authorities to bridge-building with ethnic groups has been horribly misconceived and led inevitably to the position where sexual abuse by men from Rotherham’s Asian community was ignored.
Whether that is right or not, one thing is certainly clear. Long before the IISCA report is published, any useful lessons to be drawn from the process will already have emerged as evidence is taken. That means that the function of the report itself in “teaching lessons” will be extremely limited and that the main reason to publish it is to get the stories of what happened out into the open and to place the blame where it belongs. That is a judicial function and that is the reason why the enquiry should have been chaired by a judge rather than by an eminent social worker.
Still, perhaps the change in leadership will have other benefits. As an incoming chairman, Ms Jay has the opportunity to organise the workload and to split it between subcommittees. There is no reason at all why the full committee should hear the evidence into all the allegations. Surely much time can be saved by farming them out a number of “tribunals” and then printing the conclusions reached by those tribunals as a single report. Of course this way of proceeding has some disadvantages. For example it might make it harder for the Committee to see certain patterns. On the other hand it would mean that different but often similar allegations were looked at by different minds and the conclusions would be less uniform. If there is anything to be said for applying Darwin’s theory to ideas, that should produce a richer result. It is hard to say exactly where the balance of pros and cons falls here but there is one enormous advantage which dwarfs all other considerations. It would enable the entire process to be accelerated so that conclusions could be reached during witnesses’ lifetimes and it would bring forward the date when we could all begin to put this whole ghastly business behind us.
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