Grooming: Loss of liberty does not equal safety
Letters: We need an inquiry into sex abuse cases | Society | The Guardian
This letter from Anthony Stansfeld of Thames Valley police appeared in yesterday’s Guardian, and attributes the grooming and rape of girls in Oxford and elsewhere to the lack of supervision and safeguarding:
The problem is not only did people look the other way, but that the rules under which they operate can make safeguarding extremely difficult – that is what an inquiry needs to look into.
How can a pre-teenage girl in social care go missing 126 times? The answer is that her right to go to town and be groomed, then abused and raped, seems to have been regarded as more important than her being safeguarded. Until this is sorted out it is difficult for social services to do their job properly. Social care for pre-age-of-consent children must be looked into and proper rules established that makes their safeguarding easier.
The problem with this is that it overlooks the fact that care homes, boarding schools and other institutional ‘homes’ can be abusive places as well, as in fact can one’s own home. As I have written here before, my own boarding school was a dreadfully violent place and I suffered more violence there, from pupils and staff, than anywhere else I’ve been and certainly more than when I’ve been out walking in the country or in town (a narrow escape in Cairo, when I was an adult, excepted). When I was first there, as a second-year (now year 8) pupil, junior boys were not allowed out without an escort, ostensibly for safeguarding reasons, but the concern for my safety was hollow given that the school employed people who were violent and looked the other way from very public staff and pupil (including prefect) violence.
There have also been recent scandals in which care homes, boarding schools and rehabilitation units invited a celebrity in as an “honoured guest” only for him to abuse young girls. There was also an elderly vicar convicted this week of molesting children in a care home in Sussex in the 1960s and 70s; some of the victims tried to report it at the time but were beaten for doing so. There are many disabled adults who have reported that they were sexually abused at the special boarding schools they were required to attend until quite recently. I know two (both blind women, in different countries) myself. And as for “pre-age-of-consent” children, what happened to them was rape. Rape is still rape even after the age of consent.
Besides, many children go out on their own, whether they are in care or not. I was allowed out by myself when I was about 10, mostly into Croydon; I travelled by bus to school for the first year of secondary school (as many children, boys and girls, do) and used to cycle on my own in the country the summer after that (that stopped when I went away to boarding school and was reduced to being an untrusted child again). The majority do not get groomed or raped. If a child shows signs of falling into the hands of these people (or says they are being abused when away from the home) then, yes, they need to be safeguarded and stopping them going out unsupervised is one way of doing this — for the police to stop the men chatting up children and supplying them with alcohol is another. To stop them going out is also to stop them going to the library, to their friends’ houses, to the shops, to the park, or to sit under a tree and read a book. It will stop them getting away from the noise of the home and possibly from arguments or bullying. Some children from 10 upwards are more mature than others and there is no need to deny this kind of freedom to everyone just because not everyone can be trusted or will benefit from it. If parents can make this distinction, care home staff should as well.
