For all the screaming headlines about paedo rings, investigating child abuse does not seem to be an urgent matter for the establishment. Since July, when Theresa May announced two reviews of historical child sex abuse, rumours have continued to swirl. Both of the women appointed to head the inquiry, first Baroness Butler-Sloss, then Fiona Woolf, have had to stand down because they were too connected to the establishment. Butler-Sloss’s connection came via her brother, who was attorney general at the time of some of the allegations; Woolf’s via her dinners with former home secretary Leon Brittan. (Brittan dismisses claims that he did not act properly when Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens first made these allegations in the early 1980s.)
So the inquiry has no chairman and has now effectively been disbanded. The panel members have been told that their jobs will go in the new year and they can apply to be on the next panel, which may have statutory powers. The panel members can apparently decide whether to continue or suspend their work.
Is this not an extraordinary failure? We end the year no closer to bringing any justice for those who say they were abused. There is now a raft of accusations that involve the rape and actual murder of children by senior politicians.
Either this is all a vicious conspiracy or we still have an extreme reluctance to face up to child abuse. Post-Savile and post-Rotherham, I tend to the latter view. We have seen victims, male and female, over and over again, either disbelieved or deemed worthless and disposable; poor, institutionalised or, in the words of the police regarding some of the girls who were abused in Rotherham, “unrapeable”.
If this is all, indeed, a conspiracy, it is a long and powerful one which needs to be put to rest. The same names and places have been coming up for more than 20 years: Dolphin Square and the Elm Guest House.
Now the police say they are taking seriously the allegations that three young boys were murdered by a “VIP paedophile ring” and have a credible “witness” who claims to have been abused for many years at the hands of Conservative politicians. This, if true, is incendiary stuff, a heart of darkness at the centre of power, complicity at the time by the police, and an establishment cover-up.
As more information emerges and is given credence, the convening and disbanding of panels means suspicions and conspiracies thrive. It is understandable that May wants to get this absolutely right, but how can we end the year no further forward?
It may be possible to think these rumours are just gossip, in which case those involved surely want them dismantled. But we are all too aware that almost everything that is now known about Savile was said in various ways over the years, most shockingly of all by himself. There is still, though, a huge denial about the prevalence of sexual abuse – the police have told us that Rotherham was the tip of the iceberg.
That these truly horrific stories of rape and murder surface again, while inquiries into abuse are stalled by protocol, looks terrible. Survivors groups have lost confidence with both the process and the panel and want it reconvened with the power to compel evidence. This surely has to be done and seen to be done urgently. We either take child abuse seriously or we don’t. The evidence at this point is that it is pretty low on this government’s list of priorities.
