IOPC director backs calls to cancel criminal records of grooming gang victims

Independent Office for Police Conduct director of major investigations Steve Noonan said the organisation’s investigation into police misconduct over Rotherham child-sex abuse cases had highlighted the problem.

He said this week’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse on the issue further reinforced the need for action, with a Law Commission review planned.

Mr Noonan said: “As a society, we owe it to the brave survivors who came forward and shared their experiences to ensure lessons are learned.

“We are particularly pleased to see the report highlights the lasting and damaging effects this kind of abuse can have on survivors, including ending up with criminal records themselves. This is something we have seen through our own work.

“Some of the people we spoke to as part of our investigations into the police response to allegations of child sexual abuse in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 now have criminal records as a result of their actions while being exploited.

“In November we called for a review of the law surrounding such offences to provide better protection for vulnerable young people.

“We are encouraged by the commitment we received from the Law Commission to consider this as part of its next programme of law reform and we look forward to seeing the outcome of that work.”

The review of the potential law change follows a long-running campaign by Rotherham survivor Sammy Woodhouse.

This week's IICSA report found “extensive failures” in the way child sexual exploitation by criminal gangs is tackled, with police and authorities potentially downplaying the scale of abuse over concerns about negative publicity.

Child victims – some of whom reported being raped, abused, and in one case forced to perform sex acts on a group of 23 men while held at gunpoint – were often blamed by authorities for the ordeals they suffered while some were even slapped with criminal records for offences closely linked to their sexual exploitation.

The report said there was “a flawed assumption” that child sexual exploitation was “on the wane”, with councils and police forces denying the scale of the problem, despite evidence to the contrary.

The report concluded this might be down to a determination to assure they are not seen as “another Rochdale or Rotherham” – towns blighted by recent child sexual exploitation revelations – rather than a desire to “root out … and expose its scale”.

Professor Alexis Jay, who chaired the inquiry, said: “The sexual exploitation of children by networks is not a rare phenomenon confined to a small number of areas with high-profile criminal cases.

“We found extensive failures by local authorities and police forces in the ways in which they tackled this sexual abuse.

“There appeared to be a flawed assumption that child sexual exploitation was on the wane, however it has become even more of a hidden problem and increasingly underestimated.”

The report, the 18th from the IICSA since it was established, featured harrowing testimony from more than 30 young witnesses across six case study areas – Bristol, Durham, St Helens, Swansea, Tower Hamlets and Warwickshire.

The inquiry team said it “did not receive a reliable picture of child sexual exploitation” from these areas, with the data often “confused and confusing”.

It said there was evidence of child sexual exploitation by networks in all six areas, but that the relevant police forces were “generally not able to provide any evidence about these networks”.

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