UNSAFE CHILDREN Driving up Our Country’S Response to Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation
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UNSAFE CHILDREN Driving up our country’s response to child sexual abuse and exploitation March 2021 Unsafe Children: Driving up our country’s response to child sexual abuse and exploitation © The Centre for Social Justice, 2021 Published by the Centre for Social Justice, Kings Buildings, 16 Smith Square, Westminster, SW1P 3HQ www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk @CSJthinktank designbysoapbox.com contents Contents About the Centre for Social Justice 2 Forewords 3 Commissioners 9 Executive summary 10 1 Defining terms 13 2 Child sexual abuse threat assessment 21 3 Education response 33 4 Online regulation response 41 5 Legislative response 59 6 Criminal justice response 69 7 Child social care response 91 8 Policing response 95 9 Offender focused response 113 10 All frontline services response 131 11 Health, therapeutic and support response 143 Conclusion 154 Recommendations 156 Bibliography 164 Unsafe Children | Contents 1 About the Centre for Social Justice Established in 2004, the Centre for Social Justice is an independent think-tank that studies the root causes of Britain’s social problems and addresses them by recommending practical, workable policy interventions. The CSJ’s vision is to give people in the UK who are experiencing the worst multiple disadvantages and injustice every possible opportunity to reach their full potential. The majority of the CSJ’s work is organised around five ‘pathways to poverty’, first identified in our ground-breaking 2007 report Breakthrough Britain. These are: educational failure; family breakdown; economic dependency and worklessness; addiction to drugs and alcohol; and severe personal debt. Since its inception, the CSJ has changed the landscape of our political discourse by putting social justice at the heart of British politics. This has led to a transformation in government thinking and policy. For instance, in March 2013, the CSJ report It Happens Here shone a light on the horrific reality of human trafficking and modern slavery in the UK. As a direct result of this report, the Government passed the Modern Slavery Act 2015, one of the first pieces of legislation in the world to address slavery and trafficking in the 21st century. Our research is informed by experts including prominent academics, practitioners and policymakers. We also draw upon our CSJ Alliance, a unique group of charities, social enterprises and other grass-roots organisations that have a proven track-record of reversing social breakdown across the UK. The social challenges facing Britain remain serious. In 2021 and beyond, we will continue to advance the cause of social justice so that more people can continue to fulfil their potential. 2 The Centre for Social Justice foreword Foreword Us survivors are tough. We’ve each been subject to intense impact and blistering climates. But like a blade in a blacksmith’s forgery, each strike has strengthened our character, our mettle and our spirit. Every shock has emboldened our resolve to be the very sword carried by Lady Justice herself – to be vehicles for action in the face of injustice. That’s why seven of us formed the Survivors Working Group at the Centre for Social Justice. Through the lenses of experiences we all wish we never had, the Group has been a forum for examining our country’s lines of defence against child abuse and exploitation. It’s where we’ve weaved together our manifesto to protect children at-risk and to empower victims and survivors. It’s where deserts of hope have become a watershed of power, ideas and reform. You’ll see this reflected in the oasis of recommendations in this report. Too often, well-meaning policy researchers use our stories only as ‘case studies’ to animate hardship, or as ‘evidence’ to validate pre-formed hypotheses. This can inadvertently relegate survivors to being the subjects of an arms-length anthropological study – or worse, as endangered species that are hastily photographed as part of a ‘victim safari’. Our value extends far beyond this – as does our dignity. Alongside policy professionals, survivors can be equal partners in the battle against child sexual abuse and exploitation. Meaningful engagement with survivors and our lived experience can provide unique insights into the epidemic of abuse and exploitation to inspire new solutions that may succeed where others have fallen short. Further, we believe that policy founded on such co-creation is rewarded with a rare legitimacy by the survivor community – critical in a space where a catalogue of historical failures have systematically haemorrhaged victim and survivor confidence in policy solutions. The generosity of those willing to share their lived experiences combined with the empathy of policy professionals makes for a formidable policy-making partnership. The robust contents of this report are testament to this. We’re convinced that lived experience and policy leadership are two sides of the same coin, and we have been proud to demonstrate this in co-producing this report with the incredible team at the CSJ – to whom we offer the most sincere thanks and gratitude. We hope this way of working can serve as a blueprint for policy-making across the sector and beyond into the future. As survivors, many of our stories have been characterised by being ignored, hidden or gaslit. Our experiences are littered with gut-wrenching instances where power-holders have missed opportunities to take action against child sexual abuse and exploitation. Unsafe Children | Foreword 3 History cannot repeat itself here. We cannot afford for this report to gather dust atop power-holders’ bookshelves, to get lost at the bottom of in-trays, nor to be banished to the depths of filing cabinets. In line with the moral courage that it’s taken for survivors in the Survivors Working Group to step up and speak out, and in order to honour the experiences of many more victims and survivors across our country, we implore those in positions of power at all levels to step up and speak out on this too. Dignify our experiences with action. Honour our stories with reform. Lady Justice demands it – and so does the tempered sword she wields. Josh Child sexual abuse survivor Proud CSJ Survivors Working Group member 4 The Centre for Social Justice foreword Foreword When I first became Home Secretary I was warned about the toll that my responsibilities could take. Of these, I assumed that dealing with terrorists would weigh the most heavily on me. I was mistaken. It wasn’t until I visited the front-lines of the fight against child sexual abuse that I began to understand its horrifying scale and severity in our country. At the National Crime Agency, I was shown intelligence suggesting that 80,000 people in the UK posed a sexual threat to children online. The evidence that’s emerged since has forced them to revise that estimate to 300,000 – making it clear that we’re facing nothing short of a child sexual abuse epidemic. It’s also become clear that although governments, charities and tech companies have made progress on several fronts, we’re currently losing this war. Even before the pandemic, the WePROTECT Alliance was issuing warnings that the threat posed by online offending was growing faster than law enforcement could respond. Since then, child sex offenders have seized upon the restrictions intended to protect us from COVID-19, twisting them to their own advantage. In Australia, predators set up COVID-19 themed online forums to discuss new ways to target children, whilst in the UK nine million attempts to access photos and videos of children suffering sexual abuse were made in April last year alone. The damage caused by this type of offending is incalculable. Every image and frame hosted on these sites depict a real child being harmed in the real world. As well as in-person abuse, the demand for material is driving new forms of offending such as live- streaming, where abusers hire traffickers overseas to find children for them to torture and rape via video link. To our shame, Britain is the third largest consumer of this in the world. Ministers recognise the scale and complexity of sexual crimes being committed against children and are doing valuable work to fight back. However, the extent to which inadequacies in our system have allowed predators to operate undetected – sometimes for decades – is a continuing concern. That’s why following my resignation from Government, the first commitment I took on was chairing an investigation into child sexual abuse and exploitation in the UK. This report and it’s 96 recommendations are the fruit of an unprecedented collaboration between the Centre for Social Justice and a panel of expert Commissioners representing the best of their fields. Unsafe Children | Foreword 5 At its heart is the Survivors Group, a team of exceptionally courageous individuals who have been subjected to the very evil that our recommendations are designed to confront. All too often, the perspectives of those with lived experience of child sexual abuse have been treated as an afterthought. It’s not easy recounting such appalling ordeals, and I’m grateful for the insight they are uniquely placed to provide. The Group has proved especially valuable for their unvarnished accounts of safeguarding failures, shortcomings within our criminal justice system and the lack of specialist support available as they’ve tried to rebuild their lives. In light of the evidence suggesting that many survivors felt isolated and unsupported during court processes, we were incredibly concerned to find that almost a third of child sexual abuse cases were dropped last year when the victim would not support further action. While this could be for a number of reasons, it’s broadly accepted that the patchy delivery of measures intended to make the legal process less upsetting for traumatised witnesses plays a role.