Child abuse

It’s easy to forget that laws are supposed to do something useful. Legislation is increasingly press-release law, which makes everyone feel good but causes havoc when applied to the real world. Take the mad, bad idea about to go out for consultation: ‘mandatory reporting’ will make it a crime for child and health professionals to fail to report signs of child abuse to the local authority. This would allow David Cameron to be seen to make a stand against child abuse, and which politician doesn’t want that? But what a mess it will make. Failure to report signs of abuse could be punishable by up to five years in prison.

George Bell (1883–1958) was, in many respects, a typical Anglican prelate of his era. He went to Westminster and Christ Church, and passed his career in the C of E’s fast stream. Never a parish priest, he became, first, chaplain (and later, biographer) of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson; next, Dean of Canterbury; finally, Bishop of Chichester. He was not an intellectual or a contemplative. He was an effective, energetic leader, strongly interested in public affairs, a natural candidate to end up as an archbishop of the established church. This did not happen, probably because Bell opposed ‘area’ Allied bombing of Germany in the second world war. Such carpet-bombing

A ‘damning’ report has been published into the Church of England’s handling of a particular abuse case. Except it’s not very damning. In 1976 a 16-year old was abused by a priest called Garth Moore – an attempted rape took place. He kept quiet about it for a couple of years, then told various priests about it over the next few decades, including some bishops. Moore died in 1990. The Church did nothing about his claims until 2014, when it began an inquiry that led to him receiving some compensation last year. The report says that the Church was at fault for failing to advise him to report it to

Many have rightly attacked the police for their handling of the demented accusations against Field Marshal Lord Bramall, now at last dropped. They ostentatiously descended on his village in huge numbers, chatted about the case in the pub and pointlessly searched his house for ten hours. But one needs to understand that their pursuit of Lord Bramall — though not their exact methods — is the result of the system. Because the doctrine has now been established that all ‘victims’ must be ‘believed’, the police must take seriously every sex abuse accusation made and record the accusation as a reported crime (hence the huge increase in sex abuse figures). Even if you

These figures should send a chill down the spine of anyone who values basic human dignity: in England in 2013, 2,018 newborn babies were taken from their mothers and put into the care of the state. This represents a huge hike from five years earlier, in 2008, when 802 newborns were taken into care. To put it another way: in 2008, 0.1 percent of newborns were taken into the care system, while in 2013 it was 0.3 percent. What’s going on? Education secretary Nicky Moran says the figures, released today by researchers at Lancaster University, are ‘worrying’. She means it’s worrying that so many mums are so rubbish at parenting that their

Have 425,000 children really been abused during the past two years? That is the extraordinary claim suggested in a report put out earlier this week by the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, which was swallowed whole by the Today programme and many newspapers. Not even the normally-inquisitive John Humphrys raised the slightest doubt about the figure when he interviewed a woman who said she had been abused back in the 1960s. The more you dig into the data, though, the more that the estimate of 425,000 child abuse victims comes across as a pure fantasy figure. It is based on a statistical method called Multiple Systems Estimation, which involves totting up the number of reported

The Church of England has produced a lot of good men and women, but very few great ones. It is in its modest, cautious nature that it should be so. Greatness requires a lonely, single-minded strength that does not sit easily with Anglicanism’s gentle compromise. And I suspect the Church has always been hesitant and embarrassed about the one undeniably great figure it produced in the 20th century. To this day, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958, is an uncomfortable, disturbing person, like a grim obelisk set in a bleak landscape. Many British people still disapprove of his lonely public denunciation of Winston Churchill’s deliberate bombing of

There was a grim inevitability that the name Edward Heath would one day be trawled up in connection with allegations of sexual abuse of children. As one of our few unmarried prime ministers, Heath always attracted speculation about his sexuality. The public image of a private man wedded to his career, content to spend his spare time playing music and sailing, has long given way to a presumption that he must have been a repressed homosexual. Because of our national obsession with paedophilia, this in turn has all too easily morphed into the suspicion that he had a sexual interest in underage boys. Anyone who tells the police that they

Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears — which dilate on anorexia, alcoholism, cruel bereavement. When is a life worth telling? B.S. Johnson, the London-born novelist (and tireless chronicler of himself), put the most revealing sexual details into his autobiographical novels of the 1960s. They might have amounted to mere solipsistic spouting, were the writing not so good. James Rhodes, a 40-year-old classical musician, was repeatedly raped at his London prep school in the early 1980s. In his memoir, Instrumental, Rhodes tells how he found salvation in music and became one of our leading concert pianists. Written

I feel torn on pianist James Rhodes’ victory at the Supreme Court yesterday. On one hand, the lifting of the legal injunction preventing him from publishing his child-abuse memoir is a great strike for freedom of speech. But on the other hand — another child abuse memoir? Really? Rhodes had an injunction taken out against him by his ex-wife. She claimed his autobiography, which is being published by Canongate, might cause ‘serious harm’ to their son, should he read it. She went to the High Court to try to secure a ban on the more difficult stuff in Rhodes’ memoir: the parts detailing the sexual abuse he suffered as a

One would have thought that it was impossible for the Rotherham sex abuse story to become even more depressing. But it has. The Times, which has led the way in exposing this scandal, alleges that a police office and two councillors have been accused of having sex with the victims of this terrible scandal. The newspaper claims that one of the councillors involved is still serving. If this was not grim enough, the Casey report into Rotherham Council, published today, reveals a council that still won’t accept what has happened. Casey warns Rotherham Council is: ‘In denial. They denied that there had been a problem, or if there had been, that it

This is an extract from this week’s Spectator. To subscribe, click here. In 1980, June Lait and I published Can Social Work Survive?, the first critique of British social work aimed at the general public. She was a lecturer in social policy and a former social worker; I was a psychiatrist who had regular and friendly contact with social workers. But we both felt that social work had become vague and grandiose, and we compiled quite a lot of evidence to make our case. We even reported studies showing that well-intended social work interventions could be not just unhelpful but harmful. Our work was published in The Spectator, and it

Up to 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham. Children as young as 11 were trafficked, beaten, and raped by large numbers of men between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, a review into child protection has revealed. How could this have happened? A clue is given by the report’s authors, who state that ‘several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist’. ‘I didn’t want to appear racist’ is truly the ‘I was only obeying orders’ of our time. Racism has become so hysterical a subject that it has crowded out all other moral concerns, including in this case the

It is not a surprise that Lady Butler-Sloss has stepped down as chair of the independent inquiry panel into child abuse: a critical mass of stories had built up against her which meant it was impossible for her to continue leading an inquiry that is partly about conspiracy theories without herself becoming the target of conspiracy theories which would eventually weaken her findings. A resignation before the inquiry has even kicked off is a serious blow to the government, which had been trying so hard to play conspiracy whack-a-mole, to stay ahead of the critics by acting fast and appointing big names to lead big investigations into historic allegations. But