Home AffairsWritten evidence from Steven Walker and Miss Samantha Roberts [LCG 16]
Following the press release issued by the Home Affairs Select Committee on the issue of Localised Grooming and Sexual Exploitation, we write further to your press notice and your invitation for written submissions from interested parties to confirm our interest in providing evidence to the committee in light of the recent grooming case in May 2012 which involved Rochdale and Oldham. We would like to confirm our interest in giving written and oral submissions to the committee as you have not heard any evidence directly from victims to date, and we feel there is a danger this may remain the case throughout your enquiry. Consequently, we would like to ensure you hear the points of view of victims in the same or similar circumstances. If we are invited to make oral submissions, Samantha has requested that I represent her points of view on her behalf because of the mode of the enquiry and the particularly complex nature of the discourse and public speaking.
Samantha was a victim of rape and child sexual exploitation between 2005–06. One was a case of online grooming which led to several incidents of sexual abuse and rape, the other was a very serious and brutal gang-rape which involved eight men who raped her over 70 times throughout a period of 24 hours, men who had also recruited young women from Rochdale care homes. Her cases have very similar conditions to those cases in Rochdale which required the terms of reference of this parliamentary inquiry, therefore Samantha Roberts is an interested party.
I, Steven Walker, am also a victim of sexual abuse, but more significantly most of my friends and family, almost all of them, are victims of sexual abuse. I have seen the true scale of this problem in Greater Manchester and our wider society, and whilst I have rarely travelled outside this county in my entire life, I feel that based on my experiences and those of my family I can offer a significant amount of insight on these issues and therefore I am an interested party.
In May 2012, following the Rochdale grooming trial, I wrote a letter to David Cameron, from whom we have received a response, and liaised with the Rt. Hon. Michael Meachers MP in making the Home Secretary aware of Samantha Roberts case and its relationship to the Rochdale grooming trial. Samantha separately contacted the Oldham Chronicle and waived her lifetime right to anonymity as a victim of rape to highlight the wider issues and to speak out to the victims of the Rochdale case. Following those two lines of events, we started the You Have Not Defeated Me campaign to raise public awareness of sexual crime, to expose further failings by public bodies and to campaign for law and public services reform broadly around issues of child rape and sexual exploitation.
Therefore we enclose written submissions which focus on law and public services reform.
Introduction
Miss Roberts and I are both victims of sexual abuse and Samantha is a victim of a serious rape. We are the founders of the You Have Not Defeated Me campaign (http://www.youhavenotdefeated.me) which is a campaign for law and public services reform, a campaign to continue to expose the failings of public bodies who are not being honest to the central government and to raise public awareness of child rape and sexual exploitation in the United Kingdom.
I am 22 years old and have a professional background in children’s nursing and social care in addition to a strong background in other areas of healthcare, technology, law and biological science. I have worked for the NHS for over four years at nearly every hospital in England, I have worked within a social services department in Greater Manchester and I have a significant amount of experience working with critically or terminally ill children, and children who are the victims of non-accidental injuries (including sexual violence). By extension, I also have quite an insight professionally into safeguarding children and the legal processes involved in protecting children from harm. This also somewhat provides me with an understanding of young people’s concerns.
Miss Roberts is 18 years old and is training to be a teaching assistant, she is currently an apprentice at a school for special needs and she is excelling in her area of work.
We provide evidence because we feel that victims have not been represented during the enquiry by the Home Affairs Select Committee on the issue of Child Sexual Exploitation.
Executive Summary
Our submissions focus on law and public services reform around the issue of child rape and sexual exploitation. Miss Roberts case was the revelation of one of society’s more brutal sides and is indeed the hallmark of what is perceived by the public to be the cruelty of the justice system and the disconnect between government and young people. In Miss Robert’s case, a man who admitted to raping her many times and organising successive rapes was given a three year custodial sentence, that is a disgrace and the public were rightly outraged.
Young people and children face an incredible amount of prejudice in the court system and public services are not properly equipped nor properly accountable for the prevention, detection and management of child sexual exploitation. We particularly pay due regard to the submissions made by the Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council, Greater Manchester Police, Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre and both of Sue Berelowitz and Tim Loughton. However, there are still gaps in the evidence provided to the committee which do not cover justice reform or other important considerations such as the health service further to the suggestion of the Rt. Hon. Mrs Blackwood.
In Miss Roberts case, we have discovered that for quite some time there was a failure to understand the scale of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale and Oldham prior to 2008 and standard operational procedures were not followed by Greater Manchester Police on occasions where it was detrimental to recognising and coping with problem paedophile rings in Werneth, Oldham and Rochdale. The police are still failing to identify and investigate further child sexual offences which we uncovered during our research into Miss Roberts case, to date they have not investigated any significant leads.
Greater Manchester Police missed out on more than eight opportunities to prevent Miss Robert’s rape and sexual abuse in both cases. Her abuse was also not recognised in the health service because in Oldham there is over a three year waiting list for very basic mental health assessments for children, including my little sister who was witness to the case below and is another person on that waiting list. Based on other cases, we say that the support provided to victims of child rape and sexual exploitation by the social services and other services are so poor that they are not worthy of description. Miss Roberts could not take a bath for nearly a week after her horrific rape until her appointment for a forensic examination to obtain donor DNA from her attackers. We can refer the committee to the gang-rape of an 11 year old child in the same Werneth area by white men, where the health service provided no aftercare to her and the social services “did not think she would be at further foreseeable risk of significant harm” so did not provide assistance to the child or her family. The child was literally dumped back in Werneth and is at serious risk of further abuse. The case I have just referred to is very recent in the year 2009 after Operation Messenger was set up to tackle issues of this nature in our borough. It is an example of instances where children are still being forgotten. We think it would help if every case like Miss Roberts and those in the Rochdale case were automatically reviewed and assessed for weaknesses independently so that there is a reduction in public risk and a commitment to bridging gaps in the system, there are no tools in place which do this adequately at this time and is therefore an area we would suggest for reform.
Interestingly, we say that the scale of the problem is seldom truly understood and this reflects many of the attitudes of young people who feel betrayed by how out of touch legislators are with issues which affect them. Research has been carried out (Attitudes towards sexual offences by the Sentencing Council—2011) which reflects our conclusions quite well in a broad way. We are seriously concerned that the failings highlighted by the Rochdale grooming case and more widely are systemic and I feel that even we have not scratched the surface of these issues. There is an attitude problem in this country which is to the detriment of every man, woman and child who lives here. Shortly after the Rochdale grooming trial there was quite a heated debate of these prejudices in Manchester. There needs to be significant social, political and legal reform to truly influence the scale of this issue. It is clear that this problem is not going away.
We think that the racial significance of the Rochdale grooming trial has been highly overstated. We agree that there are modes and features of crime and offending which are definitely related to racial attributes, for example child sexual offending in adult gangs in the Rochdale and Oldham area does tend to involve some ethnic groups more than others, however this is less important than the real issue which is that child sexual offending has been a significant problem for some time and we are yet to be equipped to deal with the problem satisfactorily as a country. That being said however, there are issues within the Asian community. For example there are issues relating to the treatment and status of women, there are also serious racial tensions between ethnic groups. In one example, one of C’s victims who was Asian had to move out of her community because of attitudes towards her as a victim of rape and a “failed woman”. Miss Robert’s case rather differently was a case of racial hatred towards young people from white ethnic communities.
The problem of child sexual exploitation in this country is very serious, not just in terms of numbers of victims, but numbers and types of offenders. We refer the committee to the Sunday Times investigation which revealed that hundreds of paedophiles wanting to abuse victims could be found within minutes on Twitter. We also exposed independently, a hidden network of paedophiles on the internet consisting of more than 600,000 users, more than 10% of which are in the United Kingdom, totalling around 60,000 child sex offenders who are actively offending. More than 56 police officers have been charged with sexual offences, thousands of school teachers, thousands of healthcare professionals, thousands of carers and quite a few judges or people in other positions of serious public responsibility. This is a large scale problem and the current attitude seems to be that it is okay for children to be sexually abused and exploited, public confidence is low and our current way of dealing with this problem is clearly ineffective, it is time for change, it’s time for this to end.
Summary of Main Points
1. Miss Robert’s case is one of the most serious examples of rape and sexual exploitation of children in the United Kingdom over the past decade.
2. The justice system tends to be heavily prejudiced and traumatic for victims. It is quite lenient to offenders and fails to adequately deter offending behaviour because of barriers to prosecution and to the successful rehabilitation of offenders. We also say that there are many incompatibilities between statutes and between statutes and common law.
3. We have concerns about the application of children’s human rights to this issue. We suggest that the United Kingdom is failing to meet its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the European Convention on Human Rights in the context of victims.
4. There have been many failings in policing, not least a failure to follow standard operational procedures. There were at least eight occasions where Miss Roberts could have been saved by the police, and further occasions where abuse could have been detected early. The police need to be equipped to cope with this issue and to assure quality, this is still not happening following Rochdale.
5. The health service is not equipped to deal with the prevention, detection and management of child sexual exploitation. There is a blame culture and a failure to assure quality.
6. Local authorities and other public institutions still, following the Parliamentary enquiry, do not take the issue of child sexual exploitation seriously as has been indicated by CEOP’s latest report on child sexual exploitation where very few authorities responded. There are also issues around safeguarding frameworks and questions as to their effectiveness.
7. The scale of the issue is paramount, it is a significant problem and it is not going away. The scale of the issue is central to an understanding of why this issue has developed. There are many victims and many offenders. Offenders are unacceptably large in number in positions of public trust, and more widely there are an unacceptably high number of child sex offenders in this country.
8. We would say there are issues around the sexualisation of children. Children are exposed to very graphic material freely on the internet, much of which centres on the sexual exploitation of teenagers from the collapsed Soviet Union. Much of the content consists of teenagers and young adults who were trafficked or exploited during the 90’s up until today for the purposes of filming pornography. For that reason it is a heinous crime to film pornography in those countries or to circulate it to viewers. That content makes up the bulk of the adult material on the internet which young people can freely view and learn from. In addition, there are issues around the sexualisation of children, for example bras and miniskirts can be purchased for toddlers who are not sexually developed, purposely to sexualise toddlers or other young children.
9. The issue of race is overstated in these circumstances. We think that in the Rochdale case race was a feature of the offences and offending, but is not key to wider sexual exploitation. We think that in the Rochdale case and in Miss Robert’s case, public institutions did not follow their normal course of duty due to racial sensitivity. We think there are issues of race that have persisted since the lessons learnt from the “Race Riots” in 2001 which if overcome, could have prevented these crimes. We also say that there are issues related to cultural integration and bloc communities—this is related to the nature of the offences in Miss Robert’s case and the Rochdale case.
10. Social attitudes towards young people are the real issue. Young people are viewed quite negatively and this is reflected in attitudes towards sexual exploitation of children. Attitudes must change to prevent this ever happening again to another young person on a scale as in these cases.
Steven Walker and Miss Samantha Roberts
July 2012