Child Sexual Abuse > The system that is meant to protect children fails miserably at great expense to children

 

Ignore the stigma and tackle the toxic cycle of

child sexual abuse

Observer editorial, The Guardian

The idea of children being abused within their family is too upsetting for adults to contemplate. But we must

Sat 30 Nov 2024 19.00 GMT

‘I

wanted them all to notice.” This is the title of a new report on protecting children from sexual abuse within the family, taken from an interview with a child who was sexually abused and failed by the agencies that should have protected them. The report by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel (CSPRP) reviewed 136 cases of serious child sexual abuse from between 2018 and 2023, including the way in which children’s services responded. It sets out the horrific extent to which children are so often abandoned by the system and denied the safeguarding and support they desperately need.

Child sexual abuse is far more common than many people realise. At least one in 10 children will be sexually abused before the age of 16, with survey data suggesting girls are three times as likely to experience it, and disabled children twice as likely as non-disabled children. In the cases reviewed by the panel, 98% of the abusers were men.

'At least 1 in 10' are statistics from the UK, and they are very suspect. 1 in 10 may be more accurate for boys in North America, but girls are likely closer to one in four. Elsewhere in the world, those kinds of numbers would be a great improvement.

But because of the shame and stigma that surrounds child sexual abuse it is less likely to be detected and acted upon than other forms of child abuse, and this has got worse over time. In 2022, just 3.6% of child protection plans were put in place because of a primary concern about sexual abuse. The abhorrent nature of the crime means that society rarely acknowledges its true prevalence; it’s more comforting to think of it as something rare, rather than recognising that all of us will unwittingly know men who sexually abuse children.

Society is stuck in a toxic cycle: reacting with outrage every time a new scandal breaks, whether in religious institutions, in sports, in the NHS or in the media, but never making the changes needed to child protection to prevent it happening again. And when it comes to child sexual abuse within the family – one of the most common forms of child sexual abuse – it is more comfortable to pretend that it hardly ever happens.

That pretence underpins how badly we fail these children. In this broader societal context, social workers, teachers, doctors and other professionals become too slow to respond to verbal disclosures of sexual abuse and too wary of recognising other signs in the common cases where children do not feel able to speak up. Cultures in social work have been profoundly affected by the Cleveland scandal in the late 1980s, after 121 children were taken into care as a result of concerns about sexual abuse. A public outcry and an inquiry followed, as a result of media and political questioning whether these children were really abused. Though the journalist Beatrix Campbell has uncovered documentation from the National Archives that indicates that most of these children were indeed sexually abused, the legacy of Cleveland and the perception that it was a scandal of state over-intervention continues to undermine timely action.

And this is a consequence of politicians and media being more willing to put children at great risk than to leave themselves open to criticism. Children have no voice.

The CSPRP report shows that the training that social workers and other professionals typically receive on child sexual abuse – despite the sensitivities and difficulties in this area of practice – is completely inadequate; it describes a “worrying evaporation” of skills and knowledge, and “a culture of fear and silence”. Assessing the risks that adults pose to children is too often left to badly under-resourced probation services. In more than a third of the cases the panel reviewed, the abusers were known to pose a risk of sexual harm.

On this blog there are far too many stories of abused children being put into foster homes where they were further abused, some incredibly so. 

The result of all this is a system that often fails to recognise when children are being sexually abused within family contexts, and does not know how to respond when it does. Practitioners are too reluctant to intervene and support children experiencing sexual abuse, and frequently and wrongly apply a criminal standard of proof for abuse as the threshold for triggering a safeguarding response. 

The report found a lack of understanding of grooming and coercive control among children’s professionals. Even where sexual abuse is identified, they are often unclear on what they can do to support a child and their family. Social workers do not do enough to address other risk factors, such as domestic abuse, that have an impact on mothers’ ability to protect their children from abusers. In the family courts, allegations of child sexual abuse are too often written off by judges who believe that it is rare; instead they are used as evidence that a mother is encouraging children to lie in order to undermine the other parent.

The result is that, every day, children are left to suffer the most terrible harm in the family environment with very little intervention, if any at all. Many of the 136 children whose cases were reviewed had self-harmed, suffered eating disorders, were affected by PTSD, or had begun misusing substances or alcohol. Seven of them had killed themselves, 14 more had talked about taking or attempted to take their own lives.

Children’s services are undoubtedly stretched but these devastating systemic failings are more a product of societal culture than resourcing. Given the stigma, it will take great political focus and will to address child sexual abuse – both in institutions and families – by creating a paradigm shift in the way children’s services recognise and respond to it. The alternative is to effectively shrug our shoulders at this terrible form of child abuse by continuing to indulge our adult discomfort in confronting it.

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