Child sexual abuse is a heinous crime that evokes a strong emotional reaction because it is so hard to make sense of. What kind of adult would do that to a child? But it is also more common than often acknowledged: conservative estimates suggest 15% of girls and 5% of boys experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 16, which makes it as common as physical and emotional abuse.
Every so often, stories about terrible scandals involving child sexual abuse – from grooming gangs to Jimmy Savile to football clubs – punctuate the public consciousness. But the reality that underpins the headlines is that child sexual abuse affects every community; abuse within the family is most common and social services pick up just a fraction of the abuse that happens, leaving hundreds of thousands of children to suffer alone.
There are huge problems in how we detect, respond to and try to prevent child sexual abuse as a society. Because it is such a stigmatised crime, it is unusual for children to verbally disclose the fact and professionals who work with children often have inadequate training in the signs of child sexual abuse and routinely under-detect it. Because it is so uncomfortable for us as adults to confront the fact that child abusers walk among us – certainly in our own communities, sometimes in our own families – there is a tendency to “other” child sexual abuse as a crime: to see it as something people not like us do to children we don’t know. Thus the justified stigma actively undermines efforts to safeguard children from this form of abuse.
Responsible political leaders would help us to face the true nature and extent of child sex abuse in order to create a culture where it can be prevented. Irresponsible political leaders see the strong emotional reaction that child sex abuse evokes in the public and spy an opportunity to cynically exploit it for political gain.
Last week, we saw two abhorrent examples of this from both Conservatives and Labour. The home secretary, Suella Braverman, wrongly claimed that the majority of perpetrators who sexually abuse children in grooming gangs are “almost all British-Pakistani”. This is patently false. The Home Office’s own research review in 2020 concluded that the majority of group-based child sex offending is perpetrated by white offenders, and while some studies suggest an over-representation of Asian and black offenders compared with the overall population, it is not possible to draw general conclusions because this data is not representative. This rhetoric is dangerous on two counts: first, it is racist and wrongly gives the impression that men of a particular ethnicity are more likely to be sex offenders; and second because it contributes to the “othering” of child sex abuse as a crime that means adults are less likely to be aware of child sexual abuse in their own communities. It is true that in Rotherham, sensitivities around race contributed to the failure of local councillors and officials to act on evidence of these crimes. But the reasons that victims and their parents were ignored were multifaceted: the misogynistic and classist attitudes among police that led some officers to believe children as young as 11 could consent to being raped by adult men were also critical. For Braverman to make false claims about the ethnicity of perpetrators for her own political ends is unforgivable. It comes in the wake of Boris Johnson last year falsely claiming that Keir Starmer failed to prosecute the prolific abuser Jimmy Savile while director of public prosecutions.
The Labour party has shown it is no better. On Thursday, it released an ad on social media that claimed that Rishi Sunak doesn’t believe adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison. The “evidence” for this statement is the fact that Labour party analysis of Ministry of Justice data shows 4,500 adults convicted of a range of child sex offences served no prison time since 2010. Sunak was not even an elected MP for five of these years. It is true that the government has oversight of the independent sentencing council, which issues sentencing guidelines, and that in relation to some offences, parliament has introduced minimum custodial circumstances that must be imposed unless there are exceptional circumstances. But within the sentencing guidelines it is up to the independent judiciary to determine sentences for convicted offenders, and it is common for judges and magistrates to have considerable discretion. The data certainly does not support the claim that Sunak believes adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should not go to prison.
It is true that Conservative underfunding of the justice system has made it harder for all victims – including children – to achieve justice. But whether it’s coming from Boris Johnson, Braverman or Keir Starmer, the idea that the major factor in societal failures to tackle child sexual abuse is that either Starmer or Sunak is “soft” on convicted child sex offenders is ludicrous and damaging. We live in a world where misleading information increasingly gets tossed around for short-term political advantage, despite the impact on longer-term voter cynicism. But for politicians to construct a political football out of child sexual abuse marks a grim new low in our political discourse.
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