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IICSA fallout

Former Liberal leader Lord David Steel suspended over child sexual abuse inquiry evidence

Lord Steel arriving for the annual Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey

Lord David Steel had denied "hiding his head in the sand" over child abuse allegations against former MP Sir Cyril Smith.

By Alan McGuinness, Sky News

Former Liberal leader Lord David Steel has been suspended from the Lib Dems following his evidence to the child sexual abuse inquiry about Cyril Smith.

In a hearing on Wednesday, he denied "hiding his head in the sand" over child abuse allegations against Sir Cyril.

The former MP for Rochdale, who died in 2010, has been accused of sexually abusing a number of young boys.

Cyril Smith in the House of Commons in 1982

Lord Steel said he asked the late politician in 1979 about claims he abused boys at a hostel in the town and found it dated back to Smith's time as Labour councillor in the 1960s.

He told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) that he came away from the conversation "assuming" Smith had committed the offences because he did not deny them.

Lord Steel said Smith had told him police had investigated the claims and taken no action.

The party did not carry out a formal inquiry into the claims, the IICSA heard.

On the suggestion no action was taken then because Lord Steel wanted to avoid a confrontation with Smith, he told the hearing: "I wouldn't have been hiding my head in the sand.

"These allegations all related to a period some years before he was even an MP and before he was even a member of the party, therefore it did not seem to me that I had any position in the matter at all."

Following this evidence, the Lib Dems have decided to suspend Lord Steel.

The party said in a statement: "Following the evidence concerning Cyril Smith given by Lord Steel to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse on 13th March 2019 the office bearers of the Scottish Liberal Democrats have met and agreed that an investigation is needed.

The party membership of Lord Steel has been suspended pending the outcome of that investigation. That work will now commence.

"It is important that everyone in the party, and in wider society, understands the importance of vigilance and safeguarding to protect people from abuse, and that everyone has confidence in the seriousness with which we take it.

"We appreciate the difficult work that the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is doing on behalf of the victims and survivors of abuse, and the country as a whole."

The Scottish Liberal Democrats hold 5 of 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament and 4 of 59 Scottish seats in the UK Parliament. Lord Steel was leader of the party from 1976-1988.

The trauma of childhood sexual abuse:

‘I refuse to be part of that secret anymore’

Excellent insights into the devastating effects of child sex abuse

by AMANDA CASSIDY

Ireland - The SAVI report found that one in four Irish children will experience sexual abuse before the age of 18. Despite well-publicised scandals and reports, Amanda Cassidy asks why Ireland is still so slow to respond to the problem, and why so little is understood about the devastating effects on children?

*Daria was eight when the abuse started. “It was a friend of the family who we saw every couple of weekends. I adored horses at the time and he kept some on his land so he’d take me out on my own and that’s how it started. I thought that because my family trusted him, I should too. But it was very confusing because he didn’t seem like the villain I’d imagined in my head, I normalised it and told myself it wasn’t that bad. Then I’d hate myself for trying to shrink this giant trauma I was living through.”

The profound devastation caused by child sexual abuse isn’t fully understood or acknowledged. The salacious details outlined in the HBO documentary on Michael Jackson recently has given many their first insight into what it might be like to be preyed on sexually as a small child. But the conversation that followed has veered from whether or not we should play Jackson’s music, to how parents could allow their children to sleep alone with a grown man.

The fascination with Jackson and his strange life has overshadowed the complex damage that may have been inflicted on the survivors – the two men interviewed in the documentary who chart their lives growing up alongside the King of Pop.

"I cried and cried"

Daria says the long-term damage her abuse has had on her life is immeasurable. She says after trying and failing to rationalise what was happening to her, she buried it deep within so she could convince herself it was like a bad dream. “I definitely blocked the memories – I just couldn’t process how to deal with the things that happened to me  - or to put them into context.” 

It was the birth of her daughter almost 20 years after the abuse first started that kickstarted the understanding that what happened to her was far from normal. “It hit me sideways, I wasn’t ready to confront all the feelings that flooded through me. I didn’t want to revisit any of this, ever".

"But I just looked at my baby and I cried and cried wondering how nobody had protected me from this – how anyone could inflict those horrific acts on any child.”

Maeve Lewis is the executive director of One in Four Ireland. She said while rape and sexual abuse is traumatic and life-changing, experiencing it as a child is very different. “If you are raped in adulthood, we have a sense of self and support structures. While rape is terrifying and traumatic, it doesn’t necessarily destroy the sense of who we are. It is something that happened to us. Child sexual abuse becomes an intrinsic part of who you are rather than what happened to you.”

Although the name One in Four is taken from research that is due to be updated, (The 2002 SAVI report shows one in four Irish children experienced sexual abuse) it is still an outstanding statistic. In a primary school class with 25 children, that’s around 6 of them that are potentially going through something similar to what Daria experienced.

Well, not quite! Perhaps 6 out of the graduating class will have suffered sexual abuse, except many abuse victims may not make it to graduation because they often suffer from significant learning issues. But it's likely only one or two in a primary class will have suffered sexual abuse. That is, of course, one or two too many.

Use our pain to make the necessary changes

Joyce, June and Paula Kavanagh are from a family of ten children born and raised in Dublin, Ireland in the 1960s. They suffered sexual abuse at the hands of their father and went on to write a book about it. The sisters also campaign for better support services for those who survived child sexual abuse. Last year they wrote an open letter in The Irish Times to politicians, saying they had to hear about the ‘hard cases’ to help them understand the sheer magnitude of the problem.

“They need to hear from the victim who finally gets the courage to report their abuse but is met by an untrained garda who is ill-equipped to provide the support and encouragement needed. From the victim who just received notification from the DPP that their case will not be taken forward. And from the victim who has been through the legal system and received no justice because the judge, jury and legal teams do not understand the crime of abuse adequately enough to either defend or prosecute a case.”

"Ireland has proven that we can do the right thing by our citizens. We have the capacity to feel compassion and the desire to make people’s lives better. There is strength in numbers, and we have the numbers, so let’s use our pain to make the necessary changes and prevent further victims."

Self-loathing

Maeve Lewis agrees that there are simply not enough resources. “There are years long lists for counselling for children or adult survivors. In fact, we have to close our waiting list for our services. We work with those over the age of 18. Many of whom are much older. We have some people in their 70s who attend here with us. We understand that the impact of child sexual abuse lasts a lifetime.

Many still feel a huge sense of shame, most will never have told anyone and will typically describe years of incredibly deep distress. This gives way to PTSD, flashbacks, years of depression and anxiety. Self-loathing is also common. Survivors feel disgusting because of what happened. They are terrified to tell in case they are judged by others. They often struggle with parenting – especially the men – they are scared their own child will be abused and often aren’t sure if it is ok to bath their child or hug their child. It is really sad how so many lives are affected.”

However, with the right help, Maeve says it is important to remember that there is life after abuse. "Naturally, we only know about those who come forward to seek professional help. We have met many survivors who were lucky – they were able to tell a parent or loved one. In these cases, the situation can be dealt with properly with minimal effects. Others say they struggled for years – and then when they met their partner it was the first time they felt loved and accepted so they were able to open up and find a way to heal and to live fulfilling lives.

"You can’t pretend it didn’t happen, but you can understand the impact."

Online era of abuse

Daria said that she had very mixed emotions watching the recent documentary Leaving Neverland. “The boy's stories triggered the isolation – the feeling that no one understands what it is like to suffer this type of abuse. I was lucky in that my family stood by me but many child abuse survivors face further victimisation when they are not believed. That lack of validation and suspicion over their already vulnerable character is completely devastating.”

Although there is recent evidence that child sexual abuse is falling in the US, a new and updated Irish report is overdue to give a better understanding of incidences here. The final results are expected to emerge in 2024 and hope to be replicated every 10 years. The apparent drop in numbers is attributed to increased awareness and better child protection services. But although we have left one era behind, we are now entering unchartered territory with the proliferation of online images of child sex abuse and ease of information sharing.

Nothing will take away what happened to Daria but she hopes her story will be a source of support to others. “Speaking out takes the power away from abusers," she explains. "I refuse to be part of that secret anymore.”

One in Four 01 6624070

Rape Crisis Centre 24 hour helpline 1800 77 8888

Ken Clarke denies Tory whips buried allegations of child abuse by colleagues in exchange for political loyalty in the 1970s

By LARA KEAY FOR MAILONLINE

The Conservative MP, 78, was grilled on the issue during a hearing of the Westminster strand of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. 

He was quizzed about a claim made by another Tory whip Tim Fortescue in a BBC documentary in 1995.

Fortescue told the programme whips were constantly on the lookout for anything that could be used to threaten MPs and ensure they towed the party line.

But Clarke, who is the longest serving MP having been elected in 1970, denied it, saying he 'would have remembered' if he had come across someone in politics who was a paedophile.

Mr Fortescue told BBC documentary Westminster Secret Service: 'It could be debt, it might be scandal involving small boys or any kind of scandal in which a member seemed likely to be mixed up in.

'They would come and ask if we could help, and if we could, we did. We would do everything we could because we would store up brownie points.'

He added: 'If we could get a chap out of trouble they would do as you liked for ever more.' 

When asked if he had heard scandals about 'small boys', Clarke told the panel: 'I would have remembered. It would have been quite a problem - I would have remembered that.

'If I had come across someone sexually molesting children I would have remembered it.'

He questioned whether Mr Fortescue had 'really thought through' the examples he used when he gave the BBC interview.

'A paedophile is really rather strongly disapproved of and would have found the House of Commons a really rather difficult place to work if we had had one,' he said.

But he added that in a House of 600 members 'it would be astonishing if amongst those there weren't one or two paedophiles'.

'There were rumours about two or three members [but] - with the exception of Cyril Smith - none of which I would have believed.' He continued: 'Once people start gossiping, all the people who like to pretend they are in the know just repeat it.'

Mr Clarke described the atmosphere in the whips' office as 'like an old boys club' in which potentially damaging information on colleagues was written 'in a big black book'.

He said homosexuality was intensely frowned upon when he first arrived in Westminster, saying: 'Gay people were a risk - they had to keep it a deadly secret.'

He said the vast majority of the information contained in the book related to Tory members' political leanings, their attitude to legislation and comments made about their parliamentary colleagues. He said that people were never threatened with having embarrassing information about them released if they refused to obey the party whip.

'The words 'whips' office' conjure up sinister men twisting arms and so on, which is a parody of what's a perfectly straightforward political activity,' he said. But he continued: 'If you go back 50 years ago it was a different culture - paedophilia was disapproved of but prosecution of it was rare compared to today.'

He cited the example of his old school where it was an open secret that one of the teachers was abusing pupils, but nobody did anything to try and prevent it. 'I don't think people appreciated the lasting damage it did to the victims,' he said.

Referring to the Conservative party, he said: 'I wouldn't have covered up for a paedophile if I had discovered someone was a paedophile. If I found the whips knew about it and did nothing about it, I don't know what I would have done - it would have been a serious moral dilemma,' he said.

He added: 'Fortunately that dilemma never arose. I never had any factual knowledge of a paedophile in the House of Commons or anywhere else, so I'm sorry I can't help you.'

The Westminster strand of the far-reaching inquiry into historical sexual abuse in British institutions is expected to last three weeks and is due to conclude on March 22.

Newspapers covered-up alleged abuse by MP,

UK child sex inquiry told

by David Sharman 

Local newspapers were complicit in covering up alleged historic child sex abuse by an MP, it has been claimed.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has heard allegations that three papers in the Chester area knew that Sir Peter Morrison, left, had been arrested after being found in a toilet at Crewe railway station with a 15-year-old boy – but subsequently published nothing about the incident.

The titles named at the inquiry were North Wales and Chester daily The Leader, local weekly the Chester Chronicle and the now-defunct Cheshire Observer.

Sir Peter, who served as the city’s MP between 1974 and 1992 and was knighted in 1991, had been Conservative Party deputy chairman between 1986 and 1987, and Parliamentary Private Secretary to Margaret Thatcher in 1990.  He died in 1995.

Grahame Nicholls, a delegate to the Chester Constituency Labour Party from the National Union of Public Employees, told the inquiry there were rumours going around Chester that the MP “liked little boys”.

Mr Nicholls said: “The press certainly knew. The chief reporter on one of the newspapers that I was very friendly with, she would talk about it all the time, you know. So the press knew, certainly, and I knew, as I said, lots of them, and I couldn’t understand how anybody at a political level didn’t know, I just find that incredible.”

Asked how he had heard about the alleged incident in Crewe, which Mr Nicholls recalled as taking place some time between 1988 and 1990, he added: “There was a rumour going around – I say these are rumours, because that’s all they were, that something had happened in the toilets at Crewe railway station involving Peter Morrison and a 15-year-old boy.

“I read other areas where it says it was on the train, but, whatever, I mean, what I heard,  it was in the toilets – and that came from the Cheshire Observer newspaper’s reporter, that it was the toilets at Crewe.”

Mr Nicholls was quizzed on whether he thought there had been an “agreement” between the local Labour and Conservative parties at the time regarding how they would treat the alleged incident.

He replied: “My understanding was that we would – sorry, that Peter Morrison would not be standing in the 1992 election. The agreement was that if he wasn’t standing then we wouldn’t break cover on this particular story.”

Asked what he meant by “break cover”, Mr Nicholls added: “Release all the information that we had of what happened at Crewe hopefully into the local media. The local media wasn’t at that time – it wasn’t going to go along – didn’t want that published, because there was a very strong relationship between the – particularly the main newspaper and the Conservative Party.”

Asked whether the press were involved in the agreement, he replied: “Yes, they weren’t going to publish. [The Observer reporter] told me they weren’t going to publish.”

The Inquiry also heard this week from Jane Lee, secretary of the Labour Party’s Gresford and Rossett branch in 1989 and 1990, who said a Labour-supporting journalist at North Wales and Chester daily The Leader had attended a meeting of the branch and had told members about the alleged Crewe Station incident, adding it would “all be in the paper” the next morning.

However, no such story appeared in The Leader and, speaking at the inquiry, Ms Lee recalled the reporter’s response when she was subsequently asked why.

“She said the Chief Constable of Cheshire got a phone call from the Prime Minister’s office – Margaret Thatcher’s name wasn’t mentioned, but it was ‘from the Prime Minister’s office’ and had been persuaded to not press charges but to give a warning, an official warning, and, well, we said ‘Well, why didn’t that go in the paper?’, and she said – and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but she said ‘You can’t report warnings. You can’t put warnings in the paper.'”

Ms Lee added: “He was going to be given an official warning and it couldn’t be reported in the press. And that, in return, Morrison wouldn’t stand at the next General Election. That was the deal. ”

Christine Russell, who was an agent for the Labour Party between 1986 and 1992 and later served as Chester’s MP between 1997 and 2010, told the inquiry that “every reporter on the local press knew of these allegations”.

Specifically referring to the Observer, The Leader and the Chronicle, she added: “It’s certainly true that all the journalists on the three local papers were fully aware of various allegations, the Crewe allegations.”

So far, no journalists working for any of the three papers at the time have themselves been invited to give evidence at the inquiry.

Although neither The Leader nor the Chronicle were run by their current owners, Newsquest and Reach plc respectively, at the time of the alleged incident, HTFP approached both companies for comment on the claims.

Both declined to comment, but Reach-owned website Cheshire Live – the online arm of the Chronicle – itself reported the cover-up allegations in a piece published on Tuesday while Newsquest’s Chester Standard has also covered the story.

B.C. city Hindu Temple President charged for

sexually assaulting a passenger in his cab

Deepak Sharma of Abbotsford resigns after board holds emergency meeting

VIKKI HOPES, NEWS

The president of the organization that runs Abbotsford’s only Hindu temple has resigned after being charged with sexual assault while working in his job as a taxi driver.

Court records indicate that taxi driver Deepak Sharma, 60, of Abbotsford was charged in relation to an alleged incident on Jan. 2 in West Vancouver involving a passenger.

Const. Jeff Palmer, spokesperson for the West Vancouver Police Department (WVPD), confirmed the charge and said the alleged victim came forward in the early morning of Jan. 2.

She stated that she had been in Sharma’s taxi shortly before 1 a.m. and was waiting for a friend in the 100 block of Whonoak Road in West Vancouver, Palmer said.

He said the woman alleged that she was grabbed in the crotch and her hand was then forcibly placed in the driver’s genital area, which had been exposed through an open zipper.

Palmer said the woman and her friend reported the alleged incident to police after safely returning home.

The incident was then investigated, and Sharma was arrested on Jan. 17 and subsequently charged with sexual assault.

He made his first appearance in North Vancouver provincial court on Wednesday. Palmer said Sharma surrendered his West Vancouver taxi permit after receiving a revocation letter.

Sharma was the president of the Fraser Valley Hindu Cultural Society, which runs the Hindu temple on Walmsley Avenue in west Abbotsford.

When Black Press Media contacted the society for comment on Thursday, board members were unaware that Sharma had been charged.

Vice-president Ashok Sharma (no relation), said that an emergency meeting was called that evening, with Deepak in attendance. “He told us he would resign,” Ashok said.

He said Deepak confirmed the charge, but denied that he had committed any offence. Ashok said the board was shocked to hear about the accusation.

“We couldn’t believe it because he’s a good guy … We have never noticed anything like that.”

He said Deepak served a previous two-year term as president about six years ago.

This is not the first time that an individual involved with the Hindu temple has been linked to sexual improprieties.

Karam Vir, a former priest at the temple, was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison in 2013 for sexual offences involving two teenage girls.

Vir had been in Canada on a work visa and was deported back to India after completing his sentence in 2015.

Poverty, Sexual Abuse and Nowhere to Call Home:

The Life of a Homeless Cycle-Rickshaw Puller in Delhi

Karwan-e-Mohabbat
News Central 

Mohammad Abdul Kasim Ali Shaikh is a cycle-rickshaw puller in New Delhi. Abdul belongs to the faceless mass of an estimated 2.5 lakh homeless people in the capital city. He sleeps at one of the 250-odd homeless shelters in Delhi — this one is at Geeta Ghat on the banks of the Yamuna river.

Abdul’s story of impoverishment is not uncommon, yet it is one that rarely reaches enthused discussions of social classes and poverty. He moved to Delhi from his village when he was eight and has since remained homeless in the capital. Abdul was sexually abused when he was a child multiple times by multiple men. As a naive child in a big city with no one to look after him, he was lured by abusers with the promise of nothing more than a meal. “The worse I appear, the better for me. No one will approach me,” he says in a short film made by the civil society group Karwan-e-Mohabbat.

Abdul’s story reflects the nightmarish reality that many people living on the streets of Delhi have to face on a regular basis. According to a report by the NGO Save the Children, more than half the homeless children who were interviewed said that they have been sexually abused. As per a Childline India Foundation survey of the 9,589 child care institutions across the country that was undertaken over two years, from December 2015 till March 2017, 1,575 children suffered sexual abuse before they were rescued and placed in shelter homes — 1,286 were girls and 286 were boys.

Abdul is now HIV positive. The fact that his disease has made sure he never goes back home to his family, however, has not crushed his resilience. “If you chase me from here, I’ll go to Jaipur. If I’m chased from Jaipur, I’ll go to Ajmer. If I’m chased for Ajmer, I’ll move to Kanpur. If I’m chased away from Kanpur, I’ll be off to Kolkata. And if they chase me from there too, I’ll come back to Delhi,” says Abdul, not willing to be stopped by a world that has never shown him kindness.

“Patri ka aadmi patri mein hi rehta hai” — a man of the streets will forever remain on the streets.