The child abuse inquiry: “a complete mess”
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse “has become a shambles”, said the Financial Times. No fewer than three chairwomen have resigned, and last week the lead counsel to the inquiry, Ben Emmerson QC, also stepped down – having been suspended the previous day because the new chair, Alexis Jay, was “concerned” about his leadership of the counsel team. It emerged that his deputy, Elizabeth Prochaska, had resigned two weeks before. The inquiry was set up in 2014 by Prime Minister Theresa May, who was then home secretary. “There is no reason to doubt her good intentions.” But it is clear that the process has been badly “bungled”. Two years on, it has already spent nearly £20m – “but has yet to hear an hour of testimony”.
Like many other survivors of abuse, I placed my faith in this inquiry, said James Rhodes in The Guardian. To give a voice to hundreds of thousands of people who had suffered terribly seemed like a “profoundly kind” thing to do – and also a necessary step. We must try to understand everything we can about abuse and how to stop it: there were 47,000 recorded sex offences against children in 2014-2015 alone. But the inquiry has been beset by an “appalling” catalogue of “mistakes, disasters and obstructions”. To “all but the most naive of survivors”, this “simply screams cover-up”.
“The banal truth is that the Home Office has long been capable of making a complete mess of anything, without even meaning to do so,” said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. Many senior lawyers were amazed that Emmerson – described to me as “a brilliant intellect, but completely out of control”– was appointed to lead the inquiry. Yet even the most reliable QC would “despair” at the inquiry’s “impossible remit”: looking into more than half a century’s worth of conduct in schools, scout clubs, hospitals, children’s homes, churches and so on. Narrowing the inquiry’s scope will be unpopular, said Juliet Samuel in The Sunday Telegraph. No one wants to tell survivors that their stories are “too old, expensive or obscure to be worth hearing”. But it will need to be done, if the inquiry is to be at all “feasible”.