Negative Stories in the War on Child Sexual Abuse - Episode XII > Scotland Fail; Mozambique Horror; Nigeria Going Nowhere; EU Going Backwards

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Scottish ministers led to believe child sex abuse not 'systemic failure'

A former MSP has said government ministers were led to believe the sexual abuse of children in care was not a systemic failure and therefore did not justify a public inquiry.

By Emma O'Neill, The Scotsman

Wednesday, 18th November 2020, 6:31 pm

Lady Smith chairs the sexual abuse inquiry

Peter Peacock, who served as Education Minister from 2003 to 2006 and was an MSP from 1999 to 2011, gave evidence to the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry on Wednesday.

Mr Peacock said ministers on the Scottish Executive - now named the Scottish Government - were led to believe it was "rogue individuals" carrying out the abuse, in a briefing note at a meeting in September 2003.

The latest phase of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry is exploring reasons why calls between August 2002 to December 2014 for a public inquiry to be held were resisted by ministers.

Ministers were told in a memo from senior civil servant Colin MacLean in May 2003: "The pressure for the [Scottish] Executive to act has not been intense.

"Aside from the [Daly] petition and two stories in The Sunday Mail, there has not been widespread Parliament or public interest. Noticeably, cross-party interest hasn't been taken up and The Sunday Mail received less than 20 responses to a request for stories."

It added: "The criminal convictions have been isolated and there is no evidence emerged of widespread abuse. It would therefore be feasible to do nothing. We do not recommend a full inquiry as allegations are not substantial enough to justify."

Mr Peacock said: "In rereading this [statement], I was asking myself this question of systemic failure and whether that referred to it being systemic in one institution so everybody in that situation was abusing, or was it a systemic failure across the entirety of care?

"We took it as an individual institution - it was systemic in that institution.

"You could also say there was no systemic failure, but a failure in the supervision of a system which allowed abuse. By standards of today, I thought it was more in terms of a systemic failure of supervision."

Prosecutor James Peoples QC asked Mr Peacock: "So what appears to be said [in the 2003 memo] is that the problem of abuse was not a widespread problem?"

The former government minister replied: "It presented itself as individuals acting alone, as problems sporadically arising and not part of a pattern."

And no effort was made to verify that theory!!!!

Mozambique: Early pregnancy increases due to child sexual abuse – UNHCR

By LUSA

The war in Cabo Delgado is causing an increase in cases of early pregnancy due to child sexual abuse, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warned in a summary of the conflict between rebels and Mozambique’s government.

“Women and adolescents have been abducted, forced to marry, raped and subjected to other forms of sexual violence, highlighted by the increase in teenage pregnancies in affected districts, as well as worrying reports of forced marriages,” the UNHCR said in a document released on Tuesday.

The reports include forced recruitment of children for armed groups that plague the region where Africa’s largest private investment for natural gas extraction is beginning.

The situation in Cabo Delgado is critical, with widespread reports of human rights violations, the organisation said.

The alert comes after another launched three weeks ago by the Centre for Public Integrity (CIP), a Mozambican NGO, on sexual abuse against displaced women in exchange for humanitarian aid, saying there was silence from the government and the United Nations on the matter.

Despite the questions raised by Lusa, there were no reactions to the CIP report.

According to the latest UNHCR document, more than 3,000 structures, mainly traditional houses, but also shops, banks, infrastructure and public facilities have been looted, damaged or destroyed.

Those displaced in camps, with tents or taking advantage of public spaces (usually schools) are a minority. About 90% of the internally displaced are living with relatives or friends in already precarious houses, so there are problems of overcrowding.

“Sometimes 20 to 30 people share a common space, creating health concerns, particularly in the context of Covid-19,” the document said.

The UNHCR believes that the violence and humanitarian crisis will persist and even increase, with no sign of a reversal of the scenario, the summary in which it calls for strengthening its own funding said.

“The UNHCR’s new financial requirements for the emergency response to the situation in Cabo Delgado in 2020-2021 total $19.2 million (€16 million), with 39% of the needs being financed by 13 November,” it said.

The response aims to benefit 300,000 people in Cabo Delgado and neighbouring provinces that host internally displaced people.

The armed violence is causing a humanitarian crisis with some 2,000 deaths and 435,000 displaced people, without housing or enough food – mainly concentrated in the provincial capital, Pemba.

Cabo Delgado, Mozambique

The girl-child: Sexual/domestic violence and subdued leadership dreams

November 28, 2020 in Crime Diary,

News Update, Saturday Magazine

It is exactly one year this November that Nigeria launched its first National Sex Offenders Register. It signposted the launching of a sex offenders database of those convicted for sexual violence since 2015. Sadly, of the 36 states in Nigeria, only two states, Lagos and Ekiti have launched their own Sexual Offenders Register. 

Names have been published in Ekiti. Three men, Ajayi Peter, a 51 year old man, who was convicted for raping a 12 year old girl, Basiru Adeyanju for the sexual assault of a 17 year old girl and one Rev. Asateru Gabriel for sexually violating a 7 year old.

All their details including addresses have been published and in the Sexual offences register in Ekiti state. It is curious that the other states including the Federal capital territory, Abuja has not deemed it appropriate to domesticate the law which in the very least can serve as deterrent to some future rapists, pedophiles and Incestuous sexual perverts. 

The lockdown periods recorded an increase in the number of victims of sexual and other domestic violence against girls, women and sometimes young boys too.

The Roundtable Conversation in digging into reasons for the lack of gender parity in political leadership in Nigeria has discovered that beyond some socio-cultural and religious factors that discourage women from full participation in politics in the country sexual violence from very early age has been discovered as one danger that socially and psychologically beat down the girl-child. The mental consequences of sexual violence on the girl-child and women are enormous.

Dr. Ann Okigbo, a former Health Specialist at the World Bank and an International Consultant on Social  and Community Development expressed shock that just like many policies that are not followed through to implementation, the National Sex Offenders Register seems not to appeal to a lot of state governments seeing that they have not done anything since last year that it was launched.  

Having been in the health sector for many years, she believes that successive Nigerian governments have not really taken the health sector seriously enough given that despite the 26% UN global benchmark for budgetary allocation to the health sector, Nigeria has always done below 10% which invariably shows that a lot is left undone and adolescent  sexual health gets affected too.

According to Okigbo,  successive  governments seem to always appear lethargic in implementing treaties and global agreements that  they are signatories to. She insists that governments must realize that girls grow into women and if they must contribute to leadership or be optimally productive in the country, their sexual health must be taken care of. Girls and women must be protected by the state from sexual predators and although the laws are there, the issue of implementation does not always get the needed fillip.

There is more to this article at The Nation

EU tech ban seen putting children worldwide at risk of online sex abuse

By Isaac Novak, UpNewsInfo

November 27, 2020

Online child sexual abuse could become harder to detect due to privacy protections set to take effect in the European Union next month – putting millions of children at increased risk worldwide, critics of the proposals have warned.

Under the changes, big tech firms like Facebook and Microsoft would be banned from using automatic detection tools that are routinely employed to identify material containing images of child abuse, or to detect online grooming.

Opponents say such automatic scanning infringes the privacy of people using chat and messaging apps, but the looming ban has drawn strong criticism around the world – from children’s rights advocates to U.S. actor and tech investor Ashton Kutcher.

“Time is running out to ensure proactive and voluntary online child abuse detection methods are preserved in the EU,” Kutcher wrote on Twitter earlier this month as European lawmakers (MEPs) prepare to vote on the new directive.

Critics say the reform, set to come into force on Dec. 20, would prevent law enforcement and child protection agencies from identifying millions of child sexual abuse cases each year – not just in the 27-member state EU, but globally.

“Online child sexual abuse is a borderless crime,” Chloe Setter, head of policy at WePROTECT Global Alliance – a British nonprofit that fights child exploitation, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Europe is already host to the vast majority of known child sexual abuse material on the internet, but victims and perpetrators can be anywhere. The restriction of automated detection tools in Europe would have major implications for children globally,” she said.

Sex offenders in European countries use social media platforms to contact children around the world with the aim of grooming them, said Dorothea Czarnecki, vice chair of ECPAT Germany, an alliance of 28 children’s rights institutions. Some use translation apps to communicate with victims in countries as far afield as Vietnam, she said.

Opponents of the new directive, called the European Electronic Communications Code, also fear that banning detection tools in Europe could prompt tech firms to stop using them elsewhere, because they have global teams to moderate content.

“If a company in the EU stops using this technology overnight they would stop using it all over the world,” said Emilio Puccio, coordinator of the European Parliament Intergroup on Children’s Rights.

HIGHLY EFFECTIVE

The tools have proven highly effective at tackling online abuse and tech companies provide law enforcement authorities with about two thirds of the child sexual abuse reports they receive, children’s rights campaigners say.

Facebook, Microsoft and Google did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2019, the U.S.-based nonprofit National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received 16.9 million reports from technology companies related to suspected online child sexual exploitation.

If the directive is approved, the ban would cover anti-grooming tools used to detect suspicious activity and “classifier” tools, which help identify pictures and videos that are not already in a database of illegal content.

Leftist members of the European Parliament led by German Socialist Birgit Sippel led the push to ban the use of automatic scanning, arguing that the way the tools are currently used violates privacy and data protection rights.

They were particularly concerned that users of chat and other communication platforms could have the content of private conversations analysed.

“Even voluntary measures by private companies constitute an interference with those rights when the measures involve monitoring and analysis of content of communications and processing of personal data,” their draft proposals said.

Sippel could not be reached to comment, but those in favour of keeping automatic scanning say privacy fears are unfounded.

“Their sole purpose is to identify and flag abuse of children, not to read or spy into private communications,” Setter said.

Anti-grooming technology uses the same mechanisms as spam or malware filters, so poses no greater threat to privacy, said MEP Hilde Vautmans.

“We use these technologies to protect our computers, and we should be able to continue to use the same technologies to protect our own children from sexual abuse,” she said.

So, Birgit wants to throw millions of children under the bus for the sake of imaginary threats to privacy. I'm guessing she doesn't have children.