Police and crime commissioners across England and Wales are dealing with a dramatic escalation in cases of reported child sexual exploitation. In Northumbria, where I am PCC, double-digit sentences have been imposed on tens of perpetrators, and police across the country are now – post-Rotherham – better trained to tackle the scourge. Yet even if we feel confident that we have the tools to tackle exploitation, prevention remains, until the government acts, a very different story.
Operation Hydrant, which has oversight of non-recent child abuse investigations into persons of public prominence or within institutional settings, has a current workload of more than 2,700 investigations, with an additional 120 referrals per month. By the end of the Goddard inquiry – set up following the Jimmy Savile scandal – Hydrant expects it will have to deal with 30,000 reports.
On top of this, police forces across England and Wales investigated 70,000 cases of child sexual abuse in 2015, of which 25% were into non-recent abuse. Simon Bailey, the head of Operation Hydrant, predicts 200,000 investigations by the year 2020 if current trends of reporting continue.
We know that child sexual abuse in all its forms is significantly under-reported, with only one in eight victims coming to the attention of police and children’s services. The financial cost of investigating these cases is immense: from a minimum of £19,000 to £500,000 or more for the most complex or prominent cases. The annual cost of child sexual abuse investigations is already over £1bn – and, if the projected rise in reporting materialises, could be £3bn by 2020. This will place significant strain on police resources – especially as PCCs are also responsible for commissioning services for victims – and may threaten other aspects of effective policing.
Even if this particularly awful form of criminality is now being met with effective police work and heavy sanctions by the courts, more health and education action is needed. I believe a key step would be to make PSHE – personal, social, health and economic – education a compulsory part of the national curriculum for every school.
Taught well, PSHE would give children who are victims of abuse the education to judge earlier that it is wrong and develop the confidence to report. Authoritative reports into abuse in Oxford and Rotherham both concluded that good-quality PSHE keeps children safe, and polls suggest overwhelming parental support for it to be taught in schools.
Since 2010 the Commons education and home affairs committees have supported the proposal, as have the chairs of the committees for women and equalities, health, and business, innovation and skills. The children’s commissioner is strongly in favour, as is the chief medical officer, the Labour front bench, two royal societies, six medical royal colleges, all the teaching unions and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners.
Schools are currently required to make provision for PSHE education only from the age of 11 and only in maintained schools, not academies . In 2013 Ofsted found that a third of schools were failing to provide age-appropriate SRE – sex and relationships education – while the PSHE Association annual survey in 2014 reported that SRE provisions had decreased in more than two-thirds of areas. It is extraordinary that even as our understanding of endemic sexual exploitation is growing, provision that can protect the young against it is decreasing.
Nicky Morgan, the former education secretary who ruled out making sex education compulsory for all schools, was reported to have been personally in favour of it. The obstacles appear to have come from David Cameron and some religious groups, and clearly there has to be an accommodation with the sensitivities of religious parents. However, given the overwhelming expert view that PSHE increases protection for children, these are hard to understand.
The police will continue to meet the challenges, but we need compulsory PSHE to protect future generations from harmful behaviour that, in the post-Savile era, we now realise has blighted so many lives. None of our young people should go into adulthood with such a heavy burden on their shoulders. Let’s be bold and take action now.
I want to invite teachers, parents, classroom assistants or just anyone who cares about protecting our young people to get in touch and let me know what you think. It may be that we can tip the desirable into the attainable if we act together now. My email address is enquiries@apccs.police.uk
