Independent report

Conclusions and Recommendations

This report on group-based child sexual exploitation results from a rapid audit of available data and literature, backed up by fieldwork in a number of areas. We have found that there has been a lot of attention paid to the issue and numerous reviews, inquiries and reports have made recommendations for improvements over many years.

Despite this, gaps remain in the data and in work to properly understand the nature of group-based child sexual exploitation, the motivations and drivers of offenders and the impacts on victims.

Improvements have not been implemented with sufficient rigour or determination, have been allowed to drift, or have not been acted on.

This audit presents an opportunity for the government, for our policing, justice and safeguarding agencies and the country as a whole, to draw a line in the sand between all of the previous reviews and a new commitment to take a series of significant actions to make sure we do not end up back here again in a few years’ time.

These actions need to be accompanied by commitments to honest, transparency and to prioritising the safety of children above all else; by an apology to all the victims of child sexual exploitation who have been let down in the past and by a more rigorous and relentless pursuit of the minority of men who have preyed on vulnerable children and looked for gaps in our safeguarding systems to commit heinous crimes.

Unless government and all the organisations involved are able to stand up and acknowledge the failures of the past, to apologise for them unreservedly, and to act now to put things right, including current cases, we will not move on as a society.

The list of recommendations set out below are important and should be acted on swiftly. They are not a comprehensive list of actions from this audit. There are a number of findings throughout this report which require further consideration and work to better understand the problems and their solutions. That will require the collective energy, curiosity and commitment of a number of government departments and agencies and we urge the Home Office to lead the action on this.

We are enormously conscious of the pressure on colleagues across statutory services; in police, local government, health and the criminal justice system. That said, these offences are at the most severe end, leaving child victims scarred for life and so need to be afforded the priority they deserve.

Before setting out this audit’s recommendations, we want to acknowledge the importance of the recommendations made by the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in their final report to improve how child sexual abuse as a whole, should be tackled. Our recommendations are therefore made on the basis that their proposals for change are being implemented.

First, we need to see children as children. We let them down when we treat or see them as adults, especially in relation to safeguarding issues and the treatment of children in the criminal justice system. We must tighten up the law to reduce uncertainty which adults can exploit to avoid or reduce the punishments that should be imposed for their crimes.

Recommendation 1: The law in England and Wales should be changed so adults who intentionally penetrate the vagina, anus or mouth of a child under 16 receive mandatory charges of rape.

This approach would mirror that taken in countries like France and reduce uncertainty around consent. We recommend the consideration of a ‘Romeo and Juliet clause’ to prevent criminalising teenagers in relationships with each other.

Second, we need a vigorous approach to righting the wrongs of the past, using known vulnerability factors to identify and bring perpetrators of these terrible offences to justice; holding agencies to account for any part they played in allowing these crimes to go undetected and unpunished in the past; and delivering justice for more victims.

Recommendation 2: A national police operation and national inquiry, co- ordinating a series of targeted investigations should be launched into child sexual exploitation in England and Wales.

Step one: A national criminal investigation

A police operation to prosecute the perpetrators of Child Sexual Education should be scoped and planned in detail by the Home Office, with the National Crime Agency (NCA) and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), with delivery overseen by the NCA who should determine the level of support or intervention necessary to supplement local forces’ capabilities.

Having scoped the operation at a national level, every local police force in England and Wales should review records to identify cases of child sexual exploitation that have not been acted on through:

ii) A review of cases that have been reported but which have not resulted in prosecutions over the last ten years (building on the Home Secretary’s existing commission to review cases where No Further Action has been identified).

ii) A review of police and children’s services records to identify children who have been at risk of or harmed by sexual exploitation over the last ten years. Following the good practice approach of the ‘Smith algorithm’ applied by West Yorkshire Police, it would identify children in care, children with repeated episodes of going missing, and children who have come to the attention of the police or children’s services for being involved in or at risk of sexual abuse. Access to children services records will require an agreement of mandatory sharing of information to avoid legal delays.

Following procedures established in Operation Stovewood, and elsewhere, potential victims identified from police and children’s services records should be approached and investigations taken forward on their behalf to prosecution where appropriate (these approaches are designed to be undertaken sensitively, with the support of partner agencies, taking full account of potential victims’ circumstances and vulnerability).

Crown Courts should play their part in this exercise to ensure these complex and traumatic cases are listed quickly to stop perpetrators evading justice and bring closure to victims.

Step 2: A national inquiry co-ordinating a series of targeted local investigations

This would be overseen by an Independent Commission which has full statutory inquiry powers, is time limited, targeted and proportionate to the numbers of victims.

Based on findings from the criminal investigation above, and submissions from victims and witnesses, an Independent Commission should review cases of failures or obstruction by statutory services to identify localities where local investigations should be instigated.

There would need to be a process to identify instances and allegations of statutory agencies’ failures, and we recommend that the government develops a list of criteria to determine the types and extent of failures which should be used to assess the triggering of a hearing.

The Independent Commission would set strict timescales and terms of reference for the local investigations which would have a single appointed legal team, with full statutory powers available to them, able to compel witnesses where they refuse to cooperate. Each investigation will call witnesses to give evidence and will require records to be submitted. Local authorities, police forces and other relevant agencies should in the meantime be required not to destroy any relevant records.

There should be a charter for victims about what they should reasonably expect from this process as they are once again asked to relive their experiences.

Local investigations could commence sooner in areas where the Independent Commission and Home Office agree that sufficient evidence already exists.

Recommendation 3: Review the criminal convictions of victims of child sexual exploitation. Quash any convictions where the government finds victims were criminalised instead of protected.

This will help to restore some justice to victims who may have been treated inappropriately in the past, receiving criminal justice sanctions where safeguarding protections should have been applied.

Third, we need to be 100% clear about what information we collect about people who commit offences in this country and those they victimise. We need to revise and improve the collection of ethnicity and nationality data of both suspects and victims for all sexual abuse and exploitation cases.

Recommendation 4: The government should make mandatory the collection of ethnicity and nationality data for all suspects in child sexual abuse and criminal exploitation cases and work with the police to improve the collection of ethnicity data for victims.

Policing should be held to account for its performance in collecting this data, including through the new police performance framework.

This reiterates an IICSA recommendation that police forces and local authorities in England and Wales must collect data on all cases of known or suspected child sexual exploitation and child sexual exploitation by networks. They recommended that these data should be separated from other data sets, including data on child sexual abuse, and be disaggregated by the sex, ethnicity and disability of both the victim and perpetrator.

Finally, we have to ensure much more effective sharing of information regarding children in all child abuse cases. Sharing of information to prevent harm to children should trump all data protection issues. We should also ensure that safeguarding agencies (including the police, local authorities, schools and health services) are using information and intelligence smartly, making the best use of technology to stay ahead of criminals, that police forces are applying the best operational

approaches to preventing, disrupting and prosecuting groups committing child sexual exploitation, and that local authorities are fully focused on child sexual exploitation alongside other forms of harm, and how their safeguarding and broader powers can be utilised to prevent it.

Recommendation 5: Mandatory sharing of information should be enforced between all statutory safeguarding partners in cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation. Compliance should be monitored by the inspectorates and overseen by the proposed Child Protection Authority.

The new duty to share information for the purposes of safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children proposed in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill needs to be assessed against the extent to which it will prevent agencies from not sharing information where the safety of children is potentially at risk.

Recommendation 6: The Department for Education should move swiftly to introduce unique reference numbers for children to improve opportunities for agencies to better share their information about children at risk of child sexual abuse.

Recommendation 7: Police information systems should be upgraded. These systems should also provide for the use of the unique reference numbers for children which are being introduced by the Department for Education.

Child Sexual Exploitation exemplifies the case for policing to be able to search its own systems, to track intelligence to make links between the hundreds of different pieces of information that might help build an intelligence picture.

There is an urgent need to enable police to be able to do this to improve investigations about children at risk including across boundaries. In some areas, AI tools are being used to search across multiple systems and capabilities like TOEX can help areas in this respect. This does not require a whole new IT system for policing – it can be done quickly and incrementally.

Recommendation 8: Child Sexual Exploitation investigations should be approached like Serious and Organised Crime.

Police forces should apply the best operational practices applied in major investigations into serious and organised crime in their approaches to past, current and future group-based child sexual exploitation. The Home Office should consider whether the ways in which police forces are supported to ensure they are applying best practice could be better co-ordinated through the NCA or other body. The forthcoming Police Reform White Paper is an opportunity to ensure there are strong national standards around the policing of Child Sexual Education.

Recommendation 9 : The Department for Education should urgently interrogate child protection data to identify the causes of the decline in child sexual abuse and exploitation representation in child in need assessment data; examine the reasons for variations across local authorities; and review the effectiveness of Serious Incident Notifications in relation to child sexual abuse and exploitation.

Recommendation 10: The government should commission research into the drivers for group-based child sexual exploitation, including online offending, cultural factors and the role of the group.

This reiterates the numerous calls that have been made for further research to be undertaken to examine potential cultural drivers for offending, to address a long- standing gap in the response to group-based child sexual exploitation, and to ensure the response evolves with newly emerging methods of offending.

Recommendation 11: The Department for Transport should take immediate action to put a stop to ‘out of area taxis’ and bring in more rigorous statutory standards for local authority licensing and regulation of taxi drivers.

This remains an area that can be exploited by individuals and groups intent on sexually exploiting children and more rigorous approaches – and consistency in those approaches across local authorities – is necessary.

Recommendation 12: The government should commit to fully resourcing the implementation of these recommendations over multiple years and to tracking their implementation across departments and other organisations, with regular reports to Parliament.

In implementing the recommendations, there is scope to consider reconfiguration and greater rationalisation of policing and other organisations and capabilities that play a part in tackling group-based child sexual exploitation.

While there may be further actions arising from this audit, the victims of child sexual exploitation in England and Wales deserve nothing less than full and swift implementation of these twelve recommendations, decisive leadership and a collective determination to fix past failings and build a strong approach for the future.