As long as we avert our gaze from sexual abuse, we will continue to fail children
The more time you spend looking at government policy, the more you realise how much of its intervention is recklessly short term, ignores the evidence and attempts to fix the problem when it’s staring us in the face, rather than prevent it escalating. Many years of it has left me a pretty hardened cynic: it takes a lot to surprise me when it comes to things the state should be doing, but doesn’t.
But I was left shocked after I recently attended a briefing from the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse in my capacity as a trustee of the Indigo Trust (which gives it some funding). Slide after slide highlighted how we are failing children who are being subjected to sexual abuse at the most basic level and, if anything, these failures are getting worse.
Child sexual abuse is more common than we would like to think. A conservative estimate is that 15% of girls and 5% of boys experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 16 – half a million children every year. It’s as common as physical and emotional abuse, yet just a fraction of this abuse is picked up by the authorities: fewer than one in 10 children experiencing sexual abuse are assessed as at risk and just one in 200 are on a child protection plan for child sexual abuse. And it’s going in the wrong direction: the number of child protection plans for child sexual abuse has fallen significantly since the early 1990s, even as the total number of plans has rocketed.
What’s going wrong? The frontline professionals charged with keeping children safe – social workers, teachers, medical staff – live in a society where there is so much guilt, shame and fear around child sexual abuse that there are powerful collective instincts to try to minimise it. There are so many variations on how this plays out. Because many people can’t imagine a worse crime, there is a strong tendency to see child sexual abuse as something that happens to children in other times, in other places, to other people’s children, perpetrated by clearly identifiable monsters rather than within your own communities and institutions. Over the years, different – and now discredited – theories have been deployed to disbelieve children who disclose their abuse (most do not), such as parental alienation syndrome, which held that mothers were encouraging children to make false allegations of abuse against separated fathers. Institutions such as the Catholic church and the BBC have at points cast perpetrators as “a few bad apples” or by making out that they, too, are victims of the bad men who abuse children. Children have even been blamed for their own abuse; just look at the preteen children written off as sexually promiscuous and undeserving of protection by professionals in Rotherham, for example.
So we as adults get to make ourselves feel better about child sexual abuse – it’s vanishingly rare, it’s a thing of the past, it’s perpetrated by evil men of a different race and cultural background to us rather than our male friends and colleagues, it wouldn’t happen to the nicely broughtup children we know. But in doing so we monumentally fail children. And it contributes to public perceptions of child sexual abuse as a uniquely unpreventable crime. The harder the crime is to understand – and the hardest is intrafamilial sexual abuse, which is also the most common sort of contact abuse – the more likely it is to go undetected.
Child protection professionals are only human and they too share in these powerful but dangerously wrong instincts about child sexual abuse. They need training to unlearn them, to understand how common child sexual abuse is. They need to learn how to spot the signs in the absence of children verbally disclosing their abuse and opportunities to build their confidence in talking about it. Yet there is no minimum training expectation on child sexual abuse for social workers. The CSA centre says it is common to come across newly qualified social workers who have had no training in it at all.
This leaves children to suffer alone. “The only grown-up that spoke to me about what would happen if I spoke about my abuse was the person abusing me,” says May Baxter-Thornton, a survivor of child sexual abuse who now works as a trainer at the CSA centre.
Why has detection fallen so much since the early 1990s and why the lack of training? Ian Dean, director of the CSA centre, has a hypothesis shared by many other experts: the controversy around a child sex abuse scandal in Cleveland in the late 1980s created a profound and long-term chilling impact on conversations among professionals. Doctors and social workers were widely criticised, including by an independent inquiry, for their “zeal” in intervening in cases of suspected child sexual abuse, supposedly with insufficient evidence. Yet there is evidence that in most cases sexual abuse was indeed happening.
The truth is that so much of how we respond to child sexual abuse is driven by kneejerk reactions to the anger and revulsion we feel when big scandals come to light. This means there has tended to be an overemphasis on recruitment and criminal checks and an underemphasis on the permissive institutional cultures that allow sexual abuse to be perpetrated by adults in positions of authority. And a neglect of the abuse that takes place within families.
This week, the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse will publish its final recommendations after running 15 investigations over seven years into institutional abuse. It is a huge opportunity to change the way we do things, from getting much better prevalence data so we understand whether we are succeeding in reducing levels of abuse, to training for all professionals. We also need more investment in prevention of sexually abusive behaviours, more accountability for leaders and have to design safer spaces for children online and in the real world. So many adults who shared their stories of abuse with the inquiry said they did so because they don’t want other children to go through it – “even if my story helps just one child in the future, it’s absolutely worth it,” one survivor said.
There is an urgent moral imperative to drop the myths about child sexual abuse that make adults more comfortable, because it is children who suffer the unthinkable price.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
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So much of how we respond to child sexual abuse is driven by kneejerk reactions to the anger and revulsion we feel