DI Laura MacInnes has worked in child protection in Oxfordshire for 25 years. When asked how the county’s police could have turned a blind eye as hundreds of children were sexually exploited by local gangs over a two-year period, she shakes her head and looks down at the floor.
“It’s amazing how understanding of child sexual exploitation has changed in the last two years,” she says. “Child exploitation was not really a known phenomenon. We didn’t understand it. If I’m honest, we just didn’t think anyone would do something as awful as we have now seen does happen. We were blinkered.”
MacInnes no longer has any illusions. In late 2012, Operation Bullfinch resulted in seven men receiving prison sentences ranging from seven to 20 years for their involvement in an Oxford child sex ring. The trial exposed years of repeated failings by Oxfordshire’s police, social workers, care home employees and health workers to protect vulnerable children from brutal and long-term sexual exploitation.
As the county’s litany of institutionalised failings became increasingly clear, MacInnes and Sue Evans, a social care team manager, were asked to build and lead a new operation dedicated to investigating child sexual exploitation in Oxfordshire.
The result is Kingfisher, an innovative venture drawing together about 20 team members from Thames Valley police, Oxfordshire county council and children’s social care. The £800,000-a-year team – which has already won two national awards – works on up to 70 cases at any one time. In the past two years, it has identified more than 200 children at risk of sexual exploitation and successfully prosecuted eight men.
MacInnes now seems almost embarrassed at how blinkered she once was.
“We have police forces visiting Kingfisher who, at the same time, say they don’t have a problem with child sexual exploitation in their areas,” she says. “We tell them that if they honestly think that, then they aren’t looking in the right places in the right way because we’ve learned that if you look properly, you will find it. There’s no question.”
The traditional approach to investigating child sexual exploitation involves professionals working in different buildings, passing information to each other on a formal basis. In contrast, the Kingfisher team works in one small room so that all information gathered is instantly shared: “We even want our phone calls overheard by the rest of the team,” says MacInnes, “because we’ve realised the power of sharing even the smallest piece of information with the rest of the team. That’s how you start putting together the jigsaw.”
Kingfisher’s approach involves social workers, whose caseloads are considerably lighter than is usual, adopting the skills of detectives – and detectives using the skills of social workers.
The innovative collaboration is not without its tensions. “There are cultural differences,” Evans admits. “Social workers and the police traditionally have different values, approaches and ethos: police catch criminals while social workers identify children at risk and protect them. These differences do come up and we disagree. But we’re able to discuss it openly.”
The close collaboration means the same social workers who initially approach a child will remain responsible for them until after the court case has concluded and the child has acclimatised to a life free of sexual abuse. This is very different from the usual order, where social workers let go of a case at the point they pass it to the police.
Working so closely with social workers has, says MacInnes, subtly changed the approach of officers. “We work on a child’s timescale now,” she says. “There’s a case we’re currently working on that involves seven men and eight victims. We identified one girl as being at risk but it took a year of work from her social worker before she disclosed.
“In the past, if there was no disclosure from a child there was nothing we could do. But now, if there’s strong evidence that there’s something going on in their life that’s not right, we continue working with that child until she is ready to disclose,” she says. “It could then take another 10 years to build a case but now we wait, running disruptions to get these men off the streets for other crimes until we’re ready for court.”
So bad were the failings of the past, that one of the main goals of Kingfisher has been to widen awareness of child sexual exploitation. Identification, prevention and prosecution are now everyone’s responsibility: every member of staff in children’s care homes across Oxfordshire has been invited to do training, along with 7,000 professionals working with children including teachers, GPs, mental health staff and midwives.
The collaboration coalesces on the frontline of Oxfordshire’s streets. Sgt Neil Applegarth, head of the Oxford East neighbourhood police team, admits he now looks at the world differently during his patrols.
“To an extent, we see situations now that are dangerous in terms of child sexual exploitation that we didn’t before because we weren’t looking for it,” he says.
His boss, Insp Rachel Patterson, agrees: “Child sexual exploitation is in the back of our minds all the time: if we see a child in a car with older people, for example, we immediately look for warning signs. Those signs can be incredibly subtle – or they can not be.”
