Police Work

Dominic Lawson makes a fair point with this comment piece in The Sunday Times in which he argues that the Police, not ridiculously expensive lawyers or judges, should investigate the current spate of claims involving historic child abuse. 

How true, especially in the light of the announcement today that the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War, which has been underway since 2011, will now be delayed until after the May 2015 general election. 

Police, not expensive lawyers, should investigate child abuse

Dominic Lawson - The Sunday Times


It was clever of Radio 4’s Today programme to have Baroness Butler-Sloss GBE PC as its guest editor for the last episode of 2014. Political news tends to be a bit thin on the ground at that time of the year and, in return for allowing the former lord justice of appeal to choose some of her own favourite topics for the programme, it could ask Butler-Sloss about her resignation as the first head of the government’s inquiry into historic child abuse.

Those who have had the patience to keep informed about this quasi-judicial fiasco will know that victims of abuse (now habitually referred to as “survivors”) had objected to Butler-Sloss on the grounds that her late brother, Sir Michael Havers, had been attorney-general at the time when abuse in high places had allegedly been covered up by “the Establishment”. The objection was taken up by various MPs acting on behalf of victims and Theresa May had little option but to accept Butler-Sloss’s resignation (and subsequently that of the replacement chairwoman, Lady Woolf, on the similar grounds of having social ties with allegedly suspect members of “the Establishment”).

The home secretary had little choice, in part because she had set up this inquiry to show how deeply concerned she was about the sexual abuse of children. So when those children (now very angry middle-aged adults) protested that their wishes and interests were being ignored, she could not resist. Never mind that Butler-Sloss had been the highest-ranking female judge in the UK, the first to become lord justice of appeal, had risen up through the family law division and had tried many cases of child abuse; indeed, these achievements, in the eyes of many objectors, actually marked her as unsuitable. This was the CV of an “establishment” figure par excellence, who was therefore somehow implicated in an overarching conspiracy.

Butler-Sloss, with disarming bluntness, told Today listeners not only that “in the past . . . people did not really recognise the seriousness of child abuse . . . and they thought it was important to protect members of the Establishment”, but also that “you need someone who knows how to run things. If you get someone from an obscure background, with no background of establishment, they’ll find it very difficult and may not be able actually to produce the goods.”

In fact there is no one who could “produce the goods”, for the simple reason that Mrs May has set an impossible task — whether she realised it or not. The head of the inquiry is charged with investigating how allegations of child abuse were dealt with “from 1970 to the present” by “government departments, parliament and ministers, police, prosecution authorities, schools including private and state-funded boarding and day schools, local authorities including care homes and children’s services, health services, prisons, secure estates, churches and other religious denominations and organisations, political parties and the armed services”.

Bear in mind that Lord Saville’s inquiry into the shooting of protesters on the streets of Derry took 12 years at a cost of nearly £200m — and that was a single incident that lasted barely two hours — and you see how likely it is that many of the “survivors” of historic child abuse will be dead by the time Mrs May’s elephantine inquiry finally produces its report (if, indeed, it ever does).

Cynics will argue that this is missing the point: all such inquiries are designed to get politicians out of difficulty, not to address injustice. So, for example, an official inquiry into Bloody Sunday had been a necessary part of getting Irish nationalist support for the Good Friday agreement. In the present instance, Mrs May was seeking to appease public outrage following the revelations that various public bodies — including the NHS and the BBC — had tolerated, if not indulged, the predatory activities of Jimmy Savile.

The problem is that outrage can be stoked rather than appeased by such actions. For instance, some older alleged victims of abuse have protested that Mrs May’s arbitrary cut-off date of 1970 excludes their own tribulations — and they have a point.

So far, the “survivors” are a cohesive group, well organised by firms of solicitors who hope to see out their careers to comfortable retirement by working on this. But one veteran of such matters wagered me that there would in time be bitter splits between victim groups, as they will have divergent objectives, some hoping for speedy financial reparation from the institutions allegedly involved, others more concerned to establish the guilt of specific individual abusers, no matter how long that takes.

The latter approach is already in train through the normal criminal process. The police, having in previous decades shown a certain reluctance to investigate eminent men accused of habitual molestation, are devoting extraordinary resources to bringing sundry former disc jockeys to court on charges of sexual abuse — as if this might somehow exonerate them for having been a little too cosy with the late Jimmy Savile.

However PR-driven this might appear, it is surely the appropriate means of addressing believable claims of abuse. If crimes have been committed, it is for the police to investigate, and, where the police show reluctance, civil prosecutions are an option. Admittedly the wheels of justice grind slowly — but not as glacially as Mrs May’s behemoth of an inquiry, even if she can finally find someone sufficiently saintly (or underemployed) to devote the rest of their professional life to it.

There is one alternative, suggested to me by a senior lawyer with a long record of pro bono work in this field and therefore not motivated principally by the need to generate funds for his chambers. It would be to set up a tribunal under a single judge that would award compensation to victims not on the basis of convictions of abusers (as many of those will now be dead), but on the balance of probability.

Doubtless some people might thereby succeed in being compensated for abuse that they did not personally experience — but the cost to the public purse from such misallocation would be tiny compared with the enormous bills that Mrs May’s gargantuan inquiry will pile up (the relatively straightforward Bloody Sunday inquiry made millionaires of about 20 lawyers).

This approach is obviously open to the objection that, unlike the public inquiry, it is not geared to establishing “lessons that can be learnt”, the rubric always used to justify such exercises. The rarely admitted truth, however, is that the reports of public inquiries, usually running to millions of words, are rarely read by anyone.

The conventional argument is that inquiries are well designed to establish new laws or principles of conduct in public institutions. The offence of child abuse, however, is not notably absent from the criminal statute book and it is obvious to anyone who has recently had children in the education system that the authorities nowadays are vigilant almost to the point of paranoia about avoiding the faintest possibility of being accused of interfering sexually with those in their charge.

The wheel has turned full circle. From a society that ignored or disbelieved children who had been abused, we are now one in which only children are believed. So their status as formerly abused children makes the “survivors” more trusted than Lady Butler-Sloss. She has my sympathy.

dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk