Bradford authorities apologise to victims of child sex abuse after report shows young people still at risk

Authorities in Bradford have apologised to victims of child sexual exploitation (CSE) after a damning report showed mistakes had been made that contributed towards the crime.
The independent review into CSE found that despite improvements being made, authorities in the city are still failing to identify children at risk, as well as ensuring perpetrators are caught and punished.

Photo: AdobeThe independent review into CSE found that despite improvements being made, authorities in the city are still failing to identify children at risk, as well as ensuring perpetrators are caught and punished.

Photo: Adobe
The independent review into CSE found that despite improvements being made, authorities in the city are still failing to identify children at risk, as well as ensuring perpetrators are caught and punished. Photo: Adobe

The independent review into CSE found that despite improvements being made, authorities in the city are still failing to identify children at risk, as well as ensuring perpetrators are caught and punished.

The report, by charity director Clare Hyde MBE, scrutinised five incidents of CSE in the city over the past 20 years.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It found that in one case in the early 2000s, authorities and a voluntary support programme colluded with an abuser rather than protecting his victim. The victim, known only as Anna, was placed in foster care with her abuser’s family and had two children while she was still a looked-after child.

In another case, a child named Fiona told authorities she was a victim of CSE but her disclosure was not acted upon and she became pregnant by her abuser.

A more recent case identified that authorities supporting a 12-year-old child partially put responsibility on her for being abused by saying she was “putting herself at risk” by creating social media profiles where she claimed to be older.

The report acknowledged that authorities in Bradford including the council, social services, and the police have improved their response to CSE cases since 2011, including forming a specialist police team and training nurses who work with teenage pregnant women to spot the signs of abuse.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Some 120 arrests have been made over the past decade, with nine men sentenced in 2019 to a total of 132 years and 8 months’ imprisonment.

But the report states that “it became clear that despite some significant improvements in agency understanding of and responses to CSE between the less recent and current cases, agencies and individuals in Bradford have not always got it right.”

The review was commissioned in 2019 but was delayed due to the pandemic.

A new management team was put in place in 2019 in Children’s Services, the council said, although the review identifies that high staff turnover has contributed towards “organisational memory loss” in individual cases.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

A joint statement from Mark Douglas, the director of Children’s Services, Bradford Council, Helen Hirst, the chief officer of Bradford District and Craven CCG and Bradford District Commander Chief Superintendent Daniel Greenwood read: “We want to apologise to the young people identified in this report and any others where the actions of agencies in Bradford has failed to protect them from child sexual exploitation (CSE).

“All the partners involved in tackling CSE recognise that we sadly do not get everything right all of the time and that we need to learn from cases where children have been exploited. The Partnership fully supported the commissioning of this review. Independent scrutiny of this issue is vital if we are to tackle it effectively.”

Children who commit crimes while being victims of CSE are at risk of entering the justice system unfairly, the independent review into sexual exploitation in Bradford said.

Four of the five children featured in the review had been arrested and in some cases convicted of offences.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

But the review warned the justice system did not take into account the trauma of the child, or how sexual exploitation had factored into their actions.

It said that authorities had failed in some cases to use a trauma-based approach which recognised the child’s challenging behaviour might be as a result of them feeling fear or distress.