Child Sexual Exploitation

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

This is my first speech as a Back Bencher for 10 years, so I hope that the House will permit me to place on the record my enormous sense of honour and privilege at having served as a Government Minister and having had some responsibility for the stewardship of our armed forces—unquestionably one of the finest institutions in our land, and revered throughout the world. While the Minister of State, Home Department, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne), is here, let me say that I had great pleasure in working with him when he was a Foreign Office Minister; that is evidence that the coalition was working well at least in one respect. I pay tribute to him for the contribution that he made.

So here I am on the Back Benches. I am delighted that my first contribution will be in this important debate, which has been engineered by three magnificent musketeers to whom I pay tribute, as has everyone else, for drawing attention to a matter of huge importance to our country and to the people of this country. The Press Gallery is largely empty, but I hope that it will be noted that for the entire afternoon this House has been constantly engaged with people making very important contributions on a serious matter of concern, and that this demonstrates Parliament’s interest in ensuring the protection of our young people. It is with pleasure that I take part. I will be brief for I have, in essence, one point to make.

The debate has been overwhelmingly, and understandably, dominated by the recent shocking experiences and the memory of earlier shocking experiences, and the sense of frustration we all share that this pattern of behaviour does not seem to have ended. My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who was an outstanding Minister who made a fantastic contribution to supporting young people, has said that it was incredible that children were being accused by officials of exercising a lifestyle choice. I think that that goes to the heart of the matter. It is shocking that these officials, who were paid by the state and acting on behalf of the rest of us, asserted such a thing. The all-party groups on runaway and missing children and adults and on looked-after children and care leavers produced a report, sponsored by the Children’s Society, which notes in its briefing for today’s debate:

“The Inquiry heard that some professionals, including police and social services, perceive these children as ‘troublesome’, ‘promiscuous’, or indeed ‘slags who knew what they were getting themselves into’”.

That is an indictment of those charged with responsibility for acting on behalf of the rest of us, and that is what we need to address.

The hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) put his finger on the point when he said that we need to look at the root causes. We need to understand why officials paid by the state took that view of these vulnerable young people.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need to consider prevention and that we need to create an environment in which our children feel safe enough to be able to tell us when something is wrong and in which they are heard when they tell us?

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

The hon. Lady makes a valid point. It is important that young people should have that confidence, which perhaps plays into the one observation that I want to make: an assault on childhood innocence, particularly that of young girls, is widespread in our country. It can be found on television, advertising and, overwhelmingly, in magazines that are on sale at eye level—not our eye level, but children’s eye level—in every supermarket in the land.

In 1996, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Peter Luff) promoted a private Member’s Bill to require these girly magazines to place on their front page their target age audience. Unfortunately, the Bill fell, but I salute my hon. Friend for his work. I tried to follow it up when I came back to the House in 1997. I had a meeting with the editors of magazines such as More! and various others. Some of those magazines had features such as “position of the month”. It was sexually mechanical and devoid of moral content. I told the editors, who were overwhelmingly female, that I had a young daughter—she was young at the time but is rather older now, although I do have a young granddaughter—and when I asked them whether they would like their daughters to see such things, they all shuffled uncomfortably in their seats.

I will pay them this tribute: they have improved. I had a look around Sainsbury’s in Farnborough to check out what the magazines were up to and I think that they have got better, but they are still overwhelmingly sex-obsessed. What are young girls to think—what are young men supposed to think—except that this is the way of life and that if they are not behaving like that or like celebrities, they are old-fashioned, fuddy-duddies, not cool and behind the times?

Even this week’s OK! magazine has a headline with somebody called Harry Styles—I am afraid that he has passed my attention, but he seems a reasonably good-looking young lad—saying, “I jumped into bed with my mate’s mum”. The story is not what one might imagine it to be—it is rather more boring and less dramatic than it might appear—but it is on the front page and designed to titillate. The obsession with exploiting the vulnerability of young people—predominantly young girls—leads to situations, examples of which have been provided by so many hon. Members today, whereby they can be exploited by men. We all know—certainly us blokes here—what men are like. That is the atmosphere in which the kind of events that were happening in Keighley go on. I salute my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins) for being so bold in what he said—I am sure that Ann Cryer would have approved thoroughly.

I submit—this is the essence of the argument that I am putting to the House—that one cannot look at the things that have gone on in north Wales and Rochdale without putting them in the wider national context. We must not just blame those whom we pay to look after these young people or the leaders of the local authorities, but must look at ourselves, the adults who buy this lurid dross and the people who produce it. We must ask ourselves what sort of society we are creating for our young people. It is hardly surprising that in our society young people, and young girls in particular, are vulnerable.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

May I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) and others on securing this valuable debate? I apologise for missing the start of it. I was taking evidence in the Home Affairs Committee for the child sexual abuse inquiry that we are conducting.

It is nearly 25 years since I worked in child protection. Whatever has happened and whatever progress has been made, some familiar problems persist. There will always be scandals in departments and agencies, and individuals who fall short of what we expect. However, the real concern must be over the doubts that continue to be fostered about the claims of those who have been abused. As others have said, that is not new.

When thinking about this debate, I was reminded of a book written by Jeffrey Masson in the early ’80s called “The Assault on Truth”. It was based on a study of previously unpublished letters belonging to Sigmund Freud. It exposed the idea that Freud’s original seduction theory was based on the notion that emotional disturbances in adults stemmed from actual early traumatic experiences, the knowledge of which had been repressed. As Members will know, Freud eventually renounced that theory in favour of the view that his woman patients had “fantasised” their early memories of rape and seduction—a view on which psychoanalysis was eventually based.

Masson was sacked from his position as project director at the Freud archives for his views, but it is clear that Freud had the gravest doubts about abandoning his seduction theory, despite being under enormous pressure from civilised Viennese society who could not tolerate the idea. Masson discovered, however, that not only had Freud read contemporary literature documenting the high incidence of sexual abuse of children, but he had witnessed autopsies of children who had been raped and murdered. Denial of the victims’ claims remains the problem, just as it was in Rochdale or with Savile.

We must try to move from denial to the acceptance that such awful things happen in our society—on our streets, in our homes with those polite respectable parents, and in children’s homes where children in particular ought to be safe. The problem, however, is that people do not think that they will be believed. “Nobody else would have believed me; he was a judge”, said one adult survivor talking to ChildLine. Another said, “My father was a policeman and a mason.” We need to listen to children and young people, and take their disclosures seriously.

With all due respect to the hon. Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) whose point I take seriously, as well as the problem of not listening there is the problem of dereliction of duty. I was stunned to hear the former chief executive of Rochdale council say that he had no knowledge of what happened there. He had never asked or heard any rumours, and none of the well-paid senior managers had brought the matter to his attention.

More than ever in this day and age there must be a duty for those in charge—those paid the grand salaries—to ask and provide evidence of when and how they regularly take a proactive role in seeking out information on such matters. It is a disgrace that someone can preside over a scandal and receive an enormous pay-off or early retirement settlement just as the scandal breaks; they are being rewarded for not protecting children. We need services that ensure that when young people find the courage to report abuse, they will be believed. Most importantly, we need to know that the cycle of abuse will be brought to an end.

We need to believe the victims. Sure, their stories might not always tally; they might get things wrong or misremember events and dates—how good would any of us be after years of abuse? We need to try to avoid confusing believing a victim and assessing how good a witness they might be. Those two things are not identical.

As I say, people get confused. When reading a Sunday newspaper this weekend, I was struck by a report about Steve Messham and how easy it was to conclude that various events in his life pointed to his being a liar and an unreliable witnesses. If that man is not traumatised by his experiences, who is? There may be an argument for smarter journalism at the BBC, but there is not one for ignoring what happened to Steve Messham.

[Lyn Brown]

Does my hon. Friend agree that part of our problem is that people who deal with such vulnerable children do not have the training to enable them to understand the veracity of the child, and to differentiate telling the truth and being a good witness in court?

[Steve McCabe]

I accept that entirely. I shall make a point on that before I conclude my speech, but I wanted to come back to how victims are left feeling.

Victims describe themselves as being in a cycle of fear and shame. They think no one will believe what is happening, and that they are to blame for the exploitation they are suffering. Barnardo’s points out that a key difference between sexual exploitation and sexual abuse is that exploitation often starts with grooming. In the beginning, the young people believe they are involved in a genuine relationship. It is therefore not that surprising that feelings of guilt accompany the problems when they try to deal with them.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne) said, it is true that survivors can move on, but they can do so only if they get the right help and support. We need to separate the search for evidence to convict the guilty from the support that victims need. When I was involved in this work nearly 25 years ago, I worked closely with the police to try to find evidence to convict. I must confess that I am not sure that enough of my attention was focused on the needs of victims.

As my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) has said, we need people in all the key agencies who have absolute understanding. We need a twin track. When someone comes forward and discloses, they need help, support and counselling to get them through, but they also need specialised help to get them through the court process, such as independent sexual violence advocates, and expert witnesses to advise the judge and jurors on what has really happened. More than anything, lawyers need to be guided to avoid inappropriate language and behaviour in the court that seeks further to victimise people.