Victims' group quits historical child sex abuse inquiry
Joe Lepper
Friday, November 18, 2016
The independent inquiry into child sex abuse has been thrown into further disarray after the largest victims' group involved announced it had lost confidence in its leadership and withdrawn from the process.
In a damning statement, the Shirley Oaks Survivors Association (SOSA), which represents 600 victims who lived in Lambeth Council-run children's homes, announced they had pulled out as the inquiry had become "an unpalatable circus".
The association said the inquiry has evolved to be "contrived in such a way that it enables the guilty to wash their dirty hands, while the establishment pats itself on the back".
Their statement also labels the inquiry as a "botch job that needs a drastic overhaul if it is ever to achieve its initial objectives". It goes on to call on the panel members to resign.
"[Their] failure to manage the largest inquiry this country has ever seen means we have been abused again, over and over," the statement added.
The group is also scathing about the appointment in August of Professor Alexis Jay as inquiry chair.
They are concerned that Jay, who had previously led the independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, has not made contact with the group since her appointment, adding that they fear she is "an uninspiring leader who cannot reach out beyond her daisy chain circle of middle-management cronies".
Last month, the association's chair, Raymond Stevenson, wrote an open letter to the home affairs select committee criticising Jay's appointment.
The scathing criticism is the latest set-back for the inquiry, which was set up in July 2014 to investigate child sex abuse allegations against councils, religious groups, the armed forces, public figures and other public and private institutions across England and Wales.
Three chairs have already quit - former president of the High Court Family Division Baroness Butler-Sloss, lawyer Dame Fiona Wool and New Zealand high court judge Justice Goddard.
Lawyers involved have also stepped down - most recently Aileen McColgan, who resigned on Wednesday.
Despite the latest development, Home Secretary Amber Rudd said the inquiry "has a vital role to play in exposing the failure of public bodies and other major organisations to prevent child sexual abuse".
"We must learn the lessons of the past and we owe it to victims and survivors to get behind the inquiry, and its chair Alexis Jay, in its endeavour," she added.
