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Child sex abuse: The horrific findings of a seven-year inquiry
Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse
IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES
By Tom Symonds
Home affairs correspondent, BBC News
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual abuse was created in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal to examine how institutions responded to allegations of abuse in England and Wales - both in the past, and today.
During seven years of hearings, 725 witnesses gave evidence at a cost of £186.6m. After investigating abuse in places such as schools, children's homes and religious institutions, IICSA has produced its final report.
It said child abuse was an "epidemic" leaving thousands of victims in its "poisonous wake". The scale of the abuse it looked at was "deeply disturbing". And it found a "horrifying picture" of children being "threatened, beaten and humiliated".
The seven-year inquiry is now over - here are some of the things it uncovered.
There was no elite paedophile ring
When the inquiry was first announced in July 2014, by the then Conservative home secretary Theresa May, there were rumours a paedophile ring of well-connected men had been abusing children for decades. Many hoped IICSA would investigate and unmask the guilty establishment figures of the past.
In fact, IICSA had no powers to accuse people unless they had previously been convicted by a court. There was no crack team of grizzled investigators waiting to comb through the files, to root out paedophiles in power.
The inquiry's true remit was different: to investigate whether institutions such as schools, councils and the police had failed to protect generations of children. There was, therefore, an investigation into the way the political institutions of Westminster had responded to allegations of abuse.
It concluded early on that there was no evidence of an organised "paedophile network" in which "persons of prominence conspired to pass children among themselves for the purpose of sexual abuse".
There was, however, "ample evidence of individual perpetrators" within politics.
A review of 37 cases found insufficient evidence to support claims that abuse by prominent people was covered up by the police. But IICSA did describe a "significant problem" of deference towards prominent people, which had put children at risk.
In the 1980s, the Conservative MP Peter Morrison was deputy chairman of the party, a government minister, and Margaret Thatcher's parliamentary private secretary, despite senior figures in government being warned of persistent concerns about his "sexual interest in small boys". In 1991 he was knighted.
Lord David Steel, the former Liberal leader, admitted he took no further action when one of his MPs, Cyril Smith, revealed he had been investigated by the police for sexual abuse. It was in the past, Lord Steel told the inquiry. Using the same reasoning, he later recommended Smith for a knighthood.
IICSA said deferring to the powerful meant almost every institution in the political world had failed to put the safety of children first.
Children weren't believed
Child sexual abuse is a crime usually committed behind closed doors. As a result, independent witnesses are rare. It is crucial that when an alleged victim comes forward, either as a child, or later as an adult, they are taken seriously.
In recent years, the police have been criticised in high-profile cases for being too willing to believe what turned out to be false allegations.
This resulted in men being wrongly accused, turning their lives upside down. It was said that after years when Savile's abuse was ignored, the pendulum had swung too far the other way.
But during its investigations, IICSA repeatedly uncovered many more situations where reports of real abuse were ignored, treated as unlikely to be true, or blamed on the alleged victim.
Deprived children, sent abroad by religious charities in the post-war years, were physically and sexual mistreated - and prevented from speaking out. The British government ignored warnings for fear of upsetting countries, including Australia, which had hosted the children.
In the Nottinghamshire care system, council staff "took the side of foster carers" over young people who said they'd been abused. Police did not treat most allegations as serious.
In specialist boarding schools investigated by the inquiry, there were examples of "headteachers who found it inconceivable that staff might abuse their positions of authority to sexually abuse children".
Girls groomed by abusive gangs of men from communities in British cities were sometimes regarded as "child prostitutes", who had encouraged the attention of their abusers, even though legally children can't consent to sex.
Child abuse is a crime where the power of the adult is used against the powerlessness of the child. That allowed the abuser, the inquiry often found, to silence their victim.
Chetham's School of Music
School children and staff were scared to speak out
At St Benedict's School, linked to Ealing Abbey, at least 20 children were terrorised with a mix of physical and sexual abuse, from the 1970s until 2008, by just two members of staff.
The Catholic school was described as a "cold, grim, forbidding place" in which corporal punishment was used as a "platform" for sexual gratification. With senior figures at the school involved in abuse, other staff said the atmosphere was "like the mafia".
Staff said they couldn't risk their jobs by speaking out and it was years before abusers were brought to justice. The school is now under new management.
Specialist music schools were another area where children were at particular risk.
At Chetham's School, in Manchester, a 14-year-old female pupil became a victim of the powerful director of music, Michael Brewer. She was groomed and sexually abused for years in the late 1970s and 1980s. She was left traumatised and unable to speak out for more than two decades.
By 1994, Brewer, then aged 49, was having sex with a 17-year-old. Not illegal at the time, but when he offered to resign, an investigation into his behaviour was "abruptly halted". His earlier abuse wasn't discovered.
Brewer was eventually convicted in 2013. Sadly his first victim, struggling with the mental health effects of her experiences, died of an overdose. IICSA described it as a "watershed moment".
The failure to report abuse to the police or child protection agencies is a constant thread running through its investigations.
Currently in England there is no statutory requirement for people working with children to report abusive behaviour to the police or other authorities.
The inquiry has called on the government to urgently introduce a system of "mandatory reporting", making it a criminal offence not to pass on witness accounts of abuse or disclosures by children or perpetrators.
Religious piety protected paedophiles
Whether it was Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or a host of smaller sects, when children were abused, the nature of religion often meant it was not confronted.
In the Catholic Church the inquiry identified "a sorry history of child sexual abuse" in which "abusive priests and monks" preyed on children for "prolonged periods of time".
Victims weren't supported and alleged abusers were protected. The culture of the Church of England facilitated it becoming "a place where abusers could hide", IICSA concluded.
The power structures of the churches, where often the clergy was regarded as untouchable, was a major reason. Their religiousness was itself used as a reason not to believe allegations made against them.
One senior figure in the 1990s Anglican Church, the Bishop of Gloucester Peter Ball, regarded himself as a "loyal friend" of King Charles III. But he was also facing allegations of child abuse.
The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Lord Carey, "simply could not believe" Ball was an abuser and "seemingly wanted the whole business to go away", IICSA said. In 2015, Ball, by this point elderly, was jailed.
Smaller religious sects protected their reputations by covering up the mistreatment of children.
In the Jehovah's Witnesses, someone accused of child abuse could only be expelled from the church if there were two witnesses to what happened. Yet as we've already seen, that was rare.
The Jehovah's Witnesses say rules published in 2018 require church elders to report all allegations of abuse to the police and this policy is applied in practice.
But the inquiry also found that the application of the "two-witness rule" in the context of child abuse could increase the suffering of victims.
Making it a legal requirement to report evidence of abuse might go some way to opening the doors of secretive religious orders.
Abuse is not just a thing of the past
Much of the inquiry's work delved into the dark corners of history, reaching back as far as the 1950s.
The inquiry has been repeatedly criticised for examining old-fashioned attitudes, which, it has been claimed, are no longer really a problem.
Protecting children has a much greater importance in modern institutions. Police forces, facing an incoming tide of cases, have had to invest significant resources in both clearing up historical allegations and dealing with new ones.
But the problem has not gone away. It has just changed. So-called "street-grooming" is still seen as a major threat to girls from troubled backgrounds in major cities.
IICSA found councils don't want to be labelled "another Rochdale, or Rotherham" and weren't collecting enough data that might identify active paedophiles.
These are the only references to the thousands of young British girls being raped, gang-raped, drugged, exploited, and assaulted by Pakistani men across the UK.
Abuse has moved online, with an estimated 80,000 people in the UK presenting some sort of sexual threat via the internet, often via live-streaming, in which paying paedophiles remotely dictates what happens on screen.
Police have developed new data forensics techniques to detect and detain paedophiles from the data they create. There are concerns about British paedophiles travelling abroad to access children, and create abusive pictures and videos.
And when children are abused, the adults they become bear the scars of their experience.
Some 6,000 victims shared their experiences with the inquiry's Truth Project, aimed at building a deeper understanding of the effects on them. A similar project has been announced for the Covid 19 public inquiry.
They are living with very real psychological problems caused by their abuse, and will continue to do so long after the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.
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Woman, 24, who ‘raped and tortured’ girl, 12, ‘boasted about
selling child’s body parts after stuffing remains in case’
Peter Allen
10:04, 17 Oct 2022, Updated: 13:34, 17 Oct 2022
A WOMAN who has been charged with raping and torturing a 12-year-old girl reportedly boasted about selling the child's body parts.
Dahbia B., 24, appeared before examining magistrates in Paris after she was arrested in connection to the gruesome death of Lola Daviet, 12.
The body of 12-year-old Lola was found with the numbers 1 and 0 scrawled across her chest. Credit: Facebook
The young girl's body was found bound and gagged inside the suitcase close to the block of flats where she lived.
It comes after chilling CCTV footage shows both the alleged murderer and her victim next to the block of flats where Lola lived.
Dahbia B., 24, originally from Algeria, was arrested on Saturday at her sister’s home in the northern Paris suburb of Bois-Colombe.
An investigating source said: "The suspect had boasted about selling body parts. Evidence suggests that the girl was taken into the basement of the flat, where she was tortured, and raped, before being strangled and having her throat cut".
The source added: "The suspect is believed to suffer from serious psychological problems. "She was living on the street, but had friends and family in the Paris area."
A judicial source confirmed that Dahbia B was in custody and charged with "the murder of a child under 15, rape, and torture."
A 43-year-old man is also still in custody in connection with making a car available to Dahbia B. over the weekend. He too faces charges in connection with the atrocity, according to a judicial source.
Dahbia B. has been remanded in custody pending trial, the source added.
Lola’s corpse was then found stuffed in a suitcase with the numbers 1 and 0 scrawled across her chest.
A post-mortem examination on Saturday concluded that Lola died of asphyxiation following a physical attack that included a knife being used to cut her body.
Her parents had reported her missing on Friday, after fearing she had been kidnapped when she failed to return from school.
CCTV footage from the building where Lola lived shows her carrying a schoolbag as she walks into the building with Dahbia B. The security camera footage was shot at 3.20 pm on Friday, and witnesses have also told police about seeing Lola and Dahbia B. together.
One resident said he saw the suspect dragging the suitcase around two hours prior to Lola's disappearance. He said: "We saw her go into the building, and she was dragging the suitcase with her. She did not seem right in the mind."
Others saw the suspect drinking a coffee and eating a croissant as she appeared to "try and work out what to do next".
The girl's father, who is a caretaker for the building where the 12-year-old disappeared from, had started to worry when the little girl failed to return home after leaving school at 3 pm on Friday. By 5pm, her worried mother went to the police station to report her missing.
She posted an image of Lola, with a message saying: "Our daughter Lola was last seen at 3:20pm in the company of a woman we do not know in our residence."
The little girl's father allegedly told police he had seen his daughter in the presence of a woman in her twenties in CCTV footage of her building.
Later, at around 11.30pm, a homeless man contacted the police after stumbling across the suitcase with the body inside.
Cop, 31, raped young girl before trying to wipe phone to escape justice
Jemma Carr
14:41, 19 Oct 2022,
A COP has been found guilty of raping a girl under the age of 13 and of wiping his phone to try to pervert the course of justice.
James Ford, 31, was found guilty of 10 counts of sexual abuse against the same child.
The ex-Hertfordshire Police cop was found guilty of four counts of rape, four of sexual assault and two of causing or inciting a child under the age of 13 to engage in sexual activity.
He was also found guilty of perverting the course of public justice, by "deliberately wiping his phone by factory resetting his Samsung Mobile ", Cambridge Crown Court heard.
The offences, which had been denied by the defendant, who served as an intervention officer, happened between 2019 and 2021.
Hertfordshire Police said Ford was suspended from duties in November last year.
The judge in the case, Mr Justice Simon Bryan, remanded Ford in custody ahead of sentencing on Friday.
Releasing jurors, he told them that Ford was "obviously going to have a lengthy custodial sentence - the sentence will be determined by me on Friday".
On Friday, he then sentenced Ford to 18 years and three months in prison.
Hertfordshire, UK
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