Emma recently addressed the CCPAS (Churches’ Child Protection Advisory Service) conference in London, sharing her views on the state of child protection and the challenge of fighting institutionalised abuse.
Emma explained how children were vulnerable to abuse within institutions with closed cultures or where authority was not challenged. She added that poor standards in child protection meant that abuse was sometimes overlooked or not properly dealt with, as was seen recently in Rotherham. You can read Emma’s full speech below.
The conference was attended by members of the faith community, child protection workers and others, with other speakers including the Bishop of Durham and the Chief Executive of CCPAS Simon Bass.
Emma’s speech to CCPAS conference
Thank you for inviting me here today to speak with you today.
It is always said that safeguarding is everyone’s business, yet in reality it rarely is everyone’s business until a scandal breaks or it directly affects families and communities.
Once this happens and then suddenly everyone becomes expert on what should have happened,
what went wrong, who is to blame and how we make sure this doesn’t happen again in the future.
A review is then completed by someone who has limited or in many cases no experience at all of child protection, recommendations are then made, legislation produced, then things go quiet until the next scandal and then the whole process is repeated again.
It has struck me since becoming a Member of Parliament how well-meaning legislation and guidance does not always translate as it is intended to on the ground, the place where it really matters. All too often implementation does not match the vision.
Children’s social work seems to be forever in a state of flux and reform, but for every new report and every promise of transformative change there is little improvement in the way services are actually delivered.
There need to be fewer lengthy studies and investigations on how we improve the system; fewer high level reports on what should be done and more emphasis on action and making sure practice is effective on the ground.
In one of the first speeches I made in Parliament I noted that there was forty years between the tragic death of Maria Colwell and Daniel Pelka yet still many of the reasons cited for their untimely deaths were the same, poor communication and information sharing between agencies and a series of missed opportunities.
Opportunities missed because social workers, police, teachers and health professionals are operating in highly bureaucratic, constantly restructured and underfunded services to such a degree that they inherently retreat into their own cultures and service demands as opposed to fostering good, robust multi-agency practices.
The recent revelations about Rotherham show how these failures are not individual – they are failures in the system itself. From my own experience in child protection, and speaking to professionals from across the country, I know that the problems identified with Rotherham’s services are not limited to that area. The abuses overlooked may not be on the same scale, but the potential is there for another Rotherham in local authorities around the country.
Review after review has failed to bring about real change, and we cannot continue to simply talk around the issue any more. We need a serious effort to fix the problems with our child protection system on the ground.
We also need to get better at making sure the legislation we produce and most importantly the guidance we produce can translate to real change, because lack of reform leads to significant and at times horrific harm being perpetrated to our children.
And we need to be proactive in addressing the problems in the child protection system, rather than making policy in reaction to the latest scandal. But we do not need to re-invent the wheel, simple fixes, to IT systems, case recording requirements and administrative support would and always have been a good starting point, yet for some reason have never been seriously considered.
All-Party Parliamentary Groups have an important role to play in ‘joining up’ thinking on issues like these, and their focused brief and cross-party makeup means they are well-positioned to put pressure on government.
As Chair of the Group on Social work and Co-Chair of the Child Protection Group I want to make sure that protecting children is always a priority for government, not just when it is in the news.
I would now like to talk about abuse in institutions.
When the Jimmy Saville scandal broke those of us in the Social Work profession saw splashed all over the papers what we already knew, that even when people have a genuine concern for a child they often do not report it, and that toxic cultures that cover up such abuse are more present in organisations than the general public realised.
People tend to feel they will not be believed, they will be ostracised by others in their organisation for being the one to speak up and their concerns may be dismissed by those in positions senior to their own.
Child sexual abuse is one of the most complex forms of social work. It needs to be conducted by experienced workers with the right support in place, it can take months of intensive skilled work with a child before they will ever feel able to disclose. Unfortunately the support sometimes falls well short of this standard and time is never something social workers have at their disposal.
I myself have seen some very poor practice. In one case of interfamilial abuse between siblings, a social worker’s solution was to putting up beaded curtains in the perpetrator’s room so that the parents could hear when they are moving to the abused sibling’s room. In that case the manager recommended that because the child was ‘safeguarded’ and the parents had acted responsibly that the case should be closed.
I know from former colleagues that this kind of response is not isolated, I also know that this kind of response is highly likely to result in further abuse but with the added angle that the child’s parents are now indirectly part of that dynamic of abuse, leaving the abused child totally helpless.
Child sexual abuse is often a complex mix of power, fear and intense secrecy, which becomes so much more complex when it takes place within an institution. This is especially true if that institution is where the child is resident, or is a trusted and valued place in the community such as the Church.
Children fear the consequences of speaking out – they feel they will not be believed, or that they will be punished. In some cases they may well be right – many abusers occupy respected positions in the community, and ‘groom’ not just the child but their family and others in the community to put themselves above suspicion.
I recently took part in a seminar series into child sexual abuse together with other MPs.
What participants in the seminar series told us was that there are often several stages between abuse being observed or suspected and any whistleblowing which leads to effective action. At every stage of this there are barriers that stop the individual from acting on their concern.
In some cases people do not correctly identify abuse – particularly when the observer is untrained.
Observers might also be reluctant to report abuse. This is a bigger problem when institutions are involved, especially if the observer is a member, because of the consequences for their own position and the reputation of the institution itself. That ‘risk’ leads some to keep quiet and hope that someone else will do something about it.
This is especially true in organisations with stricter hierarchies, where junior members may not be confident that their claims will be believed. When an abuser is higher up in the hierarchy they often also have a role in the reporting or disciplinary process, which again makes things difficult for junior members of staff.
A further issue is that there are sadly still far too many cases where there is a belief that the victim is somehow to blame for their own abuse, and that they have somehow provoked it.
For these reasons, cases of institutional abuse are in some ways the most upsetting, because there are so many stages at which victims are failed, often by the very people who have a duty to protect them. We want to believe that abuse only continues as long as it goes undetected, but this is so often not the case.
Sometimes the way organisations are designed actually enables abuse to take place because safeguards are inadequate or because practice is so poor.
In Rotherham we saw that the child protection services consistently overlooked or otherwise mismanaged cases on an astonishing scale, and we are right to feel shocked and angry that so many victims could be let down in such a fundamental way.
Across institutions the same barriers exist, and the heart of the problem is that decisions put the institution and its reputation first. When an institution is at the centre of community life people are instinctively defensive of it.
Members will find it difficult to believe stories of abuse, and even if the evidence is undeniable there are many cases where they are reluctant to report it to the authorities because they believe the institution will be damaged. The National Crime Agency has called this a culture of ‘collective denial’, which I think is a fair description.
As a result of this culture abuse is allowed to continue, and even if action is taken it is often focused on protecting the institution as much as the victim. In some cases where abuse has taken place within a religious body, the response of the authorities to a disclosure has been to move the perpetrator to a new position or location. This may prevent embarrassment, but it certainly does not prevent abuse. Victims’ needs in such cases are a low priority, even when they are believed.
This is why what is needed is a proper recognition that child protection is everybody’s responsibility, and that organisations have to be set up in ways that encourage reporting and include checks and balances to protect children. Victims and observers of abuse need to feel confident in their ability to report abuse and be believed, and there needs to be a clear process by which they can do so.
Institutional culture also need to clearly put victims first, so that members recognise their responsibilities to report abuse and feel empowered that they can do so without suffering repercussions.
The scandals of recent years have brought many of the issues the social work profession has been grappling with for years to the forefront of public consciousness.
Perhaps the only positive thing we can take from these appalling revelations is to recognise that the public’s increased awareness and understanding of institutional abuse can help us make a stronger case for action.
It is much harder for government to ignore the fundamental problems in child protection when confronted with abuse on such a horrific scale, and when public anger is so great.
One thing we must avoid, however, is the easy assumption some people have that this kind of institutional abuse is confined to the past.
Where failures are exposed in high profile organisations their leadership’s response is often to admit that although things went wrong in the past, the issues have now been addressed and so further abuse will not happen again. It is also tempting to believe that, confronted with the kind of horrific abuse that has been exposed in recent years, the authorities must do something.
The reality is that we cannot be complacent about this issue, and we must remember the powerful motivation institutions have to protect themselves.
We should not be satisfied with their assurances that the problem no longer exists – we should be constantly challenging them to do more, because it is clear that many abusers still use roles in such institutions as a way of targeting children.
There is still a long way to go in transforming attitudes to child protection and properly building safeguarding into institutions.
My aim is to make sure the urgency of this issue is understood by government and convince them of the need for real reform. This is one of my priorities as a Member of Parliament, and I and my colleagues in the All Party Groups will continue to work hard so that these concerns are heard.
We owe it to the victims of abuse to make sure that lessons are learned.
We need a new era in child protection where safeguarding really is everyone’s business.