Special Investigation: Society’s Reluctance to Acknowledge the Scale of Child Sexual Abuse and a Lack of Political Support for Its Survivors is Keeping the Vulnerable At Risk

The lack of support for survivors of child sexual exploitation is a major reason why vulnerable women are susceptible to far-right groups offering support, experts told Byline Times.

Cuts to council budgets have impacted child social care services provided by local authorities – even as demand has increased. Byline Times has previously reported on the crisis in children’s homes that has seen private equity firms, and even the Qatari Government, make hundreds of millions of pounds from putting vulnerable children in unsafe accommodation. In at least one case, staff failed to stop at-risk children from being sexually abused by men in the area.

Mental health support is another area under huge pressure. 

The risk of CSE survivors attempting suicide can be as much as six times greater than in the general population, but no ring-fenced, long-term, specialist support is provided by government or the NHS. To access even general mental health support, CSE survivors face a waiting list with nearly two million others.

Most survivors, or children at risk of abuse, are forced to rely on a patchwork of charities – some government-funded, some not – to help deal with their trauma. But these charities are themselves struggling. 

A number of those Byline Times spoke to for this investigation said charities are struggling to meet the record levels of need from a growing number of survivors while operating on shoestring budgets. Although the Government recently announced that it is doubling its funding for child abuse charities to £2.4 million, this amounts to just £22 for each of the 107,000 child sexual abuse cases logged by the police in 2022.

These problems help explain why the far-right is able to present itself as ‘filling the gap’ left by this lack of services with its own range of support for survivors. 

But it is often not just about financial support. According to several of the experts Byline Times spoke to, survivors of child sexual exploitation, and their experiences, have too often been disregarded by the Government, media, and police.

In many of the high-profile cases of on-street grooming – such as Rochdale and Rotherham, but also less well-known examples across the country – there have been systemic issues with how authorities have reacted to reports of abuse.

One report into the mass grooming of underage girls in Rochdale found that police had repeatedly failed to record evidence and testimonies of those who came forward begging for help. Authorities across the region then repeatedly failed to investigate for years after victims first came forward. Dozens of children had been sexually exploited at the hands of a gang of perpetrators operating in the area.  

Despite the press attention the issue has received in the years since, these systemic failings continue. One academic Byline Times spoke to said they had recently attended a meeting where police dismissed the testimonies of a CSE survivor as they were deemed to not be acting as upset as they should have been if they were actually a victim (despite lack of emotion being a common response to shock). 

“It is important to understand and address the reasons why some survivors and their loved ones might be susceptible to approaches from the far-right, which means thinking carefully about what they offer,” University College London’s Dr Ella Cockbain said.

Perhaps at the core of the problem is the fact that society still struggles to get to grips with the scale of child sexual abuse being perpetrated. One in 10 children – and one in six girls – are estimated to experience sexual abuse before the age of 16. Even that figure, authorities believe, is likely to be an underestimate.

Nazir Afzal, the Crown Prosecution Service’s former lead on child sexual abuse, said: “It’s far too common. I always say that it’s the pandemic that will outlive the pandemic we’ve just been through. By focusing on the exploitation of it, we mustn’t minimise the fact that it occurs and its impact.”

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Diverting Focus From Survivors To Perpetrators

For some experts, this cuts to the core of why the narrative of ‘Muslim grooming gang’ persists, even as the evidence calling into question its credibility has become clear.

“We can’t cope as individuals by accepting that, actually, this can happen to my child, my niece or nephew, or could be perpetrated by someone we know,” Helen Beckett, Professor of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of Central Lancashire, told Byline Times.

“It’s much easier to think of it as a problem ‘out there’ that affects ‘other people’. So the ‘grooming gangs’ idea fits into this othering narrative – that it’s other people over there doing this who are not like us.”

The “societal stigma and silencing” around child sexual abuse, she said, leaves us unable to contemplate, let alone discuss, its existence and scale, unless we are able to project it elsewhere, as something alien or imported.

This can have serious repercussions for society as a whole. But, more than anything, the biggest victims of that failure are sexual abuse survivors themselves. 

The experts Byline Times spoke to warned that, by solely focusing on Asian grooming gangs, thereby ignoring the scale of abuse elsewhere in society, a “hierarchy of abuse” is created. When everyone, from the media to the police, begin to place greater focus on ‘cracking down on Muslim grooming gangs’, it fails other survivors – “whose abuse is overlooked because it doesn’t fit that narrative”.