Technology
The child abuse inquiry was meant to move the dial. Three years on, nothing has changed
Russell Specterman broke down in tears and hung up the phone when his sister called to tell him that there was going to be an independent inquiry into child sex abuse.
“I just broke down,” he tells The Independent. “I knew the pain and trauma that it would bring up in me.”
Mr Specterman, 59, had grown up in the care of Lambeth, the council which became a core case study in the Independent Inquiry (IICSA). Findings would later detail the council’s institutional failings as it “retained in its employment adults who posed a risk to children” and “failed to investigate its employees when they were suspected of child sexual abuse”.
It’s been more than a decade since IICSA was first announced after posthumous investigations into the Jimmy Savile scandal revealed widespread child abuse.
It cost a staggering £186.6 million and more than 7,000 survivors were involved in the inquiry over the course of the seven years it ran. Three different panel chairs were forced to resign before Professor Alexis Jay, already a panel member, took up the mantle in August 2016.
Panel members were paid a day rate of £565 for their participation in the inquiry, according to financial reports. Dame Lowell Goddard, chair panel before Professor Jay, was paid an annual salary of £355,000 for the financial year 2015-2016.
Monday was the third anniversary of when IICSA’s findings were published in a damning final report, shedding light on the institutional nature of child sex abuse in the country. The report was unhelpfully overshadowed at the time by the resignation of Liz Truss, 44 days after her premiership began, but 20 key recommendations were made in order to protect children.
Three years on, none of the recommendations have been fully implemented and campaigners and survivors remain dissatisfied with the inertia. A further review by Baroness Louise Casey this year urged the government to act on the recommendations.
‘No justice’
Mr Specterman didn’t give live evidence, but he was a core participant and submitted a statement, something he found hard to do.
“I struggled to put pen to paper at the best of times, but it was something that needed to be done,” he says. “I wanted to help the kids.”
Years later, Mr Specterman has grown frustrated as nothing has been done. He feels there has been “no justice” and expressed concern that a lot of people involved got “fortunes out of it”.
Looking back on the inquiry, Professor Jay tells The Independent that she recognised the limitations of the sort of justice it might bring.
“A lot of people tend to think that they will gain justice from it, but if you take justice to mean criminal investigation and prosecution, a public inquiry can’t do that,” she says. “It can accurately describe what happened, and it can make recommendations for improvement in the future.”
“I was never in any doubts about the limitations of a public inquiry, but people so desperately wanted to have a public inquiry,” she adds. “I was always clear about it, but you tend to think this is not a court of law, it’s a quasi-judicial process.”
For Professor Julie MacFarlane, the fact that the recommendations have not been implemented is just further proof that there’s no political will for change.
By the time the inquiry was in action, Prof MacFarlane, now 67, had moved to Canada and already come forward as a survivor of child sex abuse from the Anglican Church in Chichester. As a prestigious legal academic, she had sued the Church in 2015, the same year that the inquiry began, and the police went on to successfully prosecute the church minister who sexually assaulted her over the period of 15 months when she was a teenager.
Already accustomed to speaking about her experience, she travelled from Canada to the United Kingdom in 2018, especially to give her testimony for the inquiry.
“By then I’d had a certain amount of practice,” she says. “I wasn’t particularly afraid of telling that story; I was ready to tell it. It seemed important to tell it, especially when I realised that there was going to be a focus on Chichester and I was going to find out all of this stuff that I had no idea... It made sense that he [the minister] was doing this in a community where there was an incredible amount of tolerance for this behaviour.”
The inquiry found that over 50 years, 20 individuals connected to Chichester Diocese were convicted or pleaded guilty to sexual offending against children. The diocese’s “neglect of the physical and spiritual well‐being of children and young people was in conflict with the Church’s mission of love and care”, according to the report.
“I felt like it was my responsibility. It would be more straightforward for me to do the actual testifying than it might be for somebody doing it for the first time or someone who was unfamiliar with doing that kind of presentation,” she adds. “This could be helpful for other people to do this.”
Prof Macfarlane remembers sitting in front of the panel and feeling “less than hopeful for what would come out of it” when she was questioned.
“I wanted them to ask me more questions, and sometimes what I tried to do in my answers was go further than they necessarily asked in their question,” she recalls. “What I felt that they didn’t necessarily quite get is... the vulnerability of people, especially younger people... to the fact that the power of the church is a very hierarchical institution and if you’re a believer, then you believe this person is next to god in your life.
“This was an accident waiting to happen when you put somebody who has God given authority in a situation in which there are younger people.”
‘A blueprint for change’
Prof Macfarlane doesn’t think the key recommendations go far enough. One core change that could help victims is taking the ability to investigate allegations of abuse out of the church’s brief.
“What the recommendations do is they describe better processes, more training etc,” she explains, adding that one change, to broaden the category of person of trust to include clergy in the Sexual Offences Act would take 15 minutes.
“Given how simple that is, and sometimes legislation is more complicated than that, [it’s clear] that there’s not a lot of real political will to do anything about this.”
With an estimated 500,000 children sexually abused every year, with fewer than one in five ever disclosing their abuse, campaign group ACT on IICSA has continued to highlight how the government hasn’t acted on what it calls a “clear blueprint for change”.
Professor Jay has warned that if the final 20 recommendations are not committed to and fully implemented within a timescale, the future for children is incredibly bleak.
“In 10 years' time, people will be there saying the same things, and children will still be being sexually abused in the most appalling ways,” she says: “I am concerned about the growth internationally, and locally, of the use of the internet and where that takes online abuse. And it is serious, the speed with which that is changing and getting worse.”
Lucy Duckworth, policy lead for the Survivor’s Trust, said: “The importance of Baroness Louise Casey’s report was that IICSA would be done and it’s really clear all the way throughout.
“We absolutely need to be looking at the individual cases of child sexual abuse like grooming gangs, like abuse in boarding schools, like in cover-up of social workers' institutions.
“There’s so many different places that it happens and each one comes with its own complexities and nuances and certainly cover-ups.
“But for the moment, our main point is that all child sexual abuse needs to stop and we’re not at a place really where we’re even understanding how widespread this is. And that’s what IICSA was for.”
Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips said: “Baroness Casey’s report revealed the unimaginable horrors that some of the most vulnerable people in this country went through, and how victims and survivors were failed. This will remain one of the darkest moments in our country’s history.
“Earlier this year, I set out how we are taking action on the recommendations Alexis Jay made in her inquiry to root out failure wherever it occurs. This includes creating a mandatory duty to report child sexual abuse, establishing a new Child Protection Authority for England that will make our children’s safety a priority, and making it easier for victims and survivors to pursue claims in the civil courts.
“But there is more to be done, which is why we are launching a new statutory inquiry into grooming gangs to direct and oversee local investigations. In parallel, policing has set up a new national operation, overseen by the National Crime Agency, which has already flagged more than 1,200 closed cases for review. This will open the door for further convictions, and there will be no hiding place for those who abused the most vulnerable.”
If you are a child and you need help because something has happened to you, you can call Childline free of charge on 0800 1111. You can also call the NSPCC if you are an adult and you are worried about a child, on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adults on 0808 801 0331
