Focus on celebrity child abusers 'distracts from threat posed by carers'
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Version 0 of 1. The focus on celebrity child abusers is threatening to distract attention from the more common threat posed to children by their own relatives and carers, according to the chief of the NSPCC. In the past two years, following revelations about Jimmy Savile, numerous cases of celebrities sexually abusing young people have hit the headlines. But Peter Wanless, chief executive of the NSPCC, warned that although the prosecutions of figures such as Savile were important, there was a danger they could detract from a pervasive problem. “Jimmy Savile was a one-off, weird, sexual predator and we are not going to successfully address the wider problem of sexual abuse of young people by looking for people in gold suits with weird hair,” said Wanless. “People need to recognise that all too often the threat is not from some distant celebrity figure but actually someone much closer to home like a relative or neighbour or sports coach.” The NSPCC was one of several leading organisations invited to Downing Street this week to hear the prime minister announce plans that could lead to teachers, social workers and others who work with young people being imprisoned for up to five years if they fail to report child abuse. Wanless welcomed the move and David Cameron’s decision to upgrade child sex abuse to the status of “a national threat” so that it is placed on a par with serious organised crime by police chiefs and elected police commissioners in their strategic planning. But he called on the government to go further and introduce an independent reporting structure for “closed institutions” such as boarding schools and care homes, where children were at their most vulnerable. “There have been too many incidences of people putting the reputation of these institutions before the safety of the children in their care and we want [there to be] a requirement for people in these institutions to report any suspicions about abuse to an outside, independent body,” Wanless said. But he said that, despite the welcome attention given to child abuse by politicians, policy makers should not focus solely on tackling the high profile cases of celebrity abuse or of the horrific stories of neglect in places such as Rotherham and Oxfordshire. “It is really dangerous if we begin to imagine this was only something that went on in the 1970s and restricted to a limited group of DJs or latterly that there was something extraordinarily and unique about what we have seen in Rotherham or Rochdale or Oxford.” He said that at the heart of the abuse of children was the abuse of power over a vulnerable young person. “If you take that insight then ask yourself where are the opportunities for adults to exercise that inappropriate balance of power then that could be a relative, a sports coach or youth group leader or it could be an older gang of boys... People must not think that there are parts of the country or population where these things don’t happen – it is just that we don’t happen to have found them yet.” |