‘This is Not Just About History…’ Addressing the Disconnect in Historic (Non‐Recent) Child Abuse Investigations

• Historic (non‐recent) child abuse investigations need to consider the effects of investigative processes on victims and survivors.
• Such investigations include those undertaken by the police and by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
• Victim and survivor accounts need to be taken seriously and investigated thoroughly in order for victims/survivors not to feel let down by, and disconnected from, criminal justice and IICSA processes.

‘Historic (non‐recent) child abuse investigations need to consider the effects of investigative processes on victims and survivors’

In response to the then chancellor George Osborne's announcement in 2014 that the UK government would set up an independent inquiry into the handling of historic child abuse cases, then shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper made a statement that highlighted:

‘This is not just about history, this is about the need for proper strong systems of child protection for the future, so that we get both justice for victims in the past but also a system that is strong enough to protect young people going forward.’ (The Guardian, 2014 )

The government held good to its promise and set up the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) ( https://www.iicsa.org.uk ) in 2014, announced by then home secretary Theresa May. Its objectives would not only be to investigate claims of a cover‐up of an alleged paedophile ring said to have operated in Westminster in the 1980s, but also to investigate broader institutional failures. Today, the IICSA aims to ‘examine the extent to which institutions and organisations in England and Wales have taken seriously their responsibility to protect children’, and to examine allegations of child sexual abuse involving ‘well known people’, that is, those in the media, politics and other areas of public life (see https:// www.iicsa.org.uk ). Its remit also includes collating testimonies from child abuse victims and survivors through its Truth Project (via private interviews and in writing) (IICSA, 2017 ). But for the victims/survivors of abuse, it is at this intersection – between holding to account both public and private institutions over child abuse, and listening to and believing victims – where a disconnect occurs, that is, between past and present; between the abuse itself and the reporting process; and between expectation and outcomes of the investigative process.

‘For the victims/survivors of abuse… a disconnect occurs… between the abuse itself and the reporting process’

This short report considers progress to date on the IICSA drawing on evidence from the inquiry itself, from press reports and from the author's personal experience of reporting historic abuse to the police and to the IICSA's Truth Project.

‘Considers progress to date on the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA)’

A ‘Legacy’ of Failures

In August 2016, after Theresa May launched the ‘new‐look’ inquiry in 2015 with new statutory powers, its chair, Dame Lowell Goddard, resigned. In her resignation statement, Goddard cited family reasons for going but perhaps more tellingly, the fact that the inquiry was ‘not an easy task, let alone one of the magnitude of this’, she added, ‘Compounding the many difficulties was its legacy of failure which has been very hard to shake off’ (BBC News, 2016a ). And it is some legacy. In its first year, the IICSA saw two of its chairs, Baroness Butler‐Sloss and Dame Fiona Woolf, step down over questions about their links to key establishment figures prominent in the 1980s. Since 2014, a number of lawyers supporting the inquiry have also either resigned or been dismissed. Historic or non‐recent child abuse has been at the centre of public, political and media debate since allegations against TV presenter and DJ Jimmy Savile emerged in 2011. This led to the setting up of Operation Yewtree in 2012 (and, down the line, to the IICSA), now just one of many separate similar operations currently being run by police forces across the country. Indeed, such is the scale of the problem that there is now a central hub – Operation Hydrant – to oversee all of these separate police investigations.

‘[Since Savile] historic or non‐recent child abuse has been at the centre of public, political and media debate’

Without a doubt, some of these have been successful in bringing to justice well known figures and ‘celebrities’ such as Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall and Paul Gadd (Gary Glitter). But other investigations have failed to establish the extent of child abuse allegations said to have been committed and subsequently covered up at Westminster, at Dolphin Square in Pimlico (Operation Midland), Elm Guest House in London (Operation Athabasca) and others, some of which have closed and others still being investigated by the police, a number of them linked to prominent public and political figures. At the same time, the police themselves are also under scrutiny as part of the IICSA and the Independent Police Complaints Commission is currently investigating 187 claims of police and establishment cover‐ups involving 18 forces (The Independent, 2016 ).     

Mentoring Siblings of Gang Members: A Template for Reaching Families of Gang Members?

Mentoring has become a popular model of intervention to reduce the risk of offending, and has been proposed as an effective tool to tackle the risk of gang membership. This paper reviews the existing literature on mentoring and reports on a qualitative evaluation of a mentoring programme targeted at young people ‘at risk’ of gang membership in an English city. The study highlights important issues around these interventions. Although we found it a useful way to engage otherwise hard‐to‐reach families, important limitations remain: their potential labelling impact and their limited impact in isolation from other more ambitious measures.     

Book Review: Religion as a Chain of Memory. By Hervieu-Léger,Danièle. New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. 204 pages,paperback, ISBN: 0-8135-2828-3

Qualitative Sociology -     

Constructing an Accounting Journal Website

Abstract

To increase the effectiveness and efficiency of searches for information, accounting students, researchers, practitioners, and regulators could benefit from a Website devoted to the electronic access to journals. The site described here addresses such a need in the business discipline of accounting. On the site, the titles of over 470 journals are listed and categorized by topical areas within accounting. Then, within each accounting category, the journals are grouped according to their Internet accessibility. To provide the user with quick access to the various journals, the site provides links to the homepages of the various journals. Serials Review 2002; 28:201–205.     

Psychological impact of writing about abuse or positive experiences

Writing often helps people deal with trauma. To see if writing about childhood physical or sexual abuse, or positive experiences, helps, psychology undergraduates wrote for 20 minutes on 4 days about their abuse, a positive experience, or a trivial topic. Among 102 who began and 85 who completed pre-, post-, and 4-week follow-up measures of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideas, abuse writers were more likely to discontinue, and positive writers were more depressed and anxious. Compared to pretest, all completers were less depressed, anxious, and suicidal at follow-up, but nonsignificantly different in health visits. Completers who wrote about abuse rated the study as more valuable than did those who wrote about positive experiences. College students who wrote about childhood physical or sexual abuse benefited from any type of structured writing assignment (where they interacted with a researcher and got extra credit) in terms of reduced anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideas, but they found value in writing about their trauma more than writing about innocuous topics.     

The extent of children's knowledge of court as estimated by guardians ad litem

‘Knowledge of court’ questionnaires were completed by 35 designated professionals (guardians ad litem) with specific responsibility for children in family proceedings in the civil judicial system within England and Wales who then estimated the percentage of 11‐year old children, in general, which they would expect to provide a ‘full’, ‘partial’ and ‘incorrect’ answer to each question. These estimations were compared with normative data on this questionnaire obtained from actual 11‐year‐olds. This comparison suggests that guardians ad litem tend to overestimate the extent of such children's knowledge, implying that individual children may not be as well prepared for involvement with the legal system as such informed professionals might believe; such a tendency might render it less likely that easily corrected misconceptions and gaps in knowledge be identified and subsequently addressed, thereby failing to minimize the stress (e.g. fear of the unknown) which can often accompany contact with the courts. The possibility that the discrepancy between actual and estimated scores might be, in part, due to a failure in adults to adopt the ‘psychological perspective’ of the child in the unfamiliar world of the adult judicial system is discussed. Although this possibility requires further investigation, making an explicit effort to ‘get into the child's shoes’ is suggested as a potentially valuable and practical first step towards reducing such discrepancies. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Blame the Parents? Challenges for Parent‐Focused Programmes for Families of Gang‐Involved Young People

Parent‐focused interventions are a potentially effective tool for preventing and reducing gang involvement, although the challenges of delivering such services are considerable. Drawing from data collected over 26 months for the ethnographic study, Youth Gangs in an English City, including interviews with parents of gang‐involved young people, we identify potential obstacles. These include: psychological barriers to the participation of parents relating to perceived denial, stigma and blame; and possible counter‐productivity of interventions. Strategies to minimise these are discussed.