Speaking to the UK’s House of Commons on 6 January, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper pledged action on tackling child sexual abuse. She highlighted that none of the 20 recommendations from the country’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) had yet been implemented since its final report was published in autumn 2022. 

The IICSA’s purpose was to ‘consider whether public bodies – and other non-state institutions – have taken seriously their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse’. Its remit was to investigate allegations of abuse in churches, schools, custodial institutions, political parties, religious groups and children’s homes, with the evidence assessed stretching back decades.

Cooper announced action on three key recommendations made by the IICSA. Firstly, measures on the mandatory reporting of abuse will appear in the Crime and Policing Bill, to be placed before Parliament in the spring. Secondly, the government will legislate to make grooming an aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences (CSO). And finally, it’ll introduce provision for a single, consistent child identifier into the Children and Wellbeing Bill – this would need to be used when information about a child is processed for safeguarding and promotion of welfare purposes. This step would fulfil the IICSA’s recommendation to introduce one core data set on child abuse and protection. The government also aims to strengthen the police performance framework in relation to CSO.

Barbara Connolly KC, a Member of the IBA Family Law Committee Advisory Board, agrees that the focus should be on the implementation of the IICSA recommendations. ‘The IICSA report is massive in its scale,’ says Connolly, a barrister at 7 Bedford Row and specialist in child and family law. She says that a new inquiry on child sexual abuse, as some have called for, would go over ‘old ground’, be expensive and take years to complete. ‘What we need is for the IICSA recommendations to be adopted, and if they’re not we need to know why.’

Although the government hasn’t ordered a statutory national inquiry, in mid-January it did announce a nationwide review of grooming gang evidence and five government-backed local inquiries. Cooper said that ‘effective local inquiries can delve into far more local detail and deliver more locally relevant answers, and change, than a lengthy nationwide inquiry can provide’. For Connolly, ‘local inquiries are probably better when you are looking at responses from local agencies,’ as opposed to the government directly intervening. 

Perhaps the most significant reform announced by the government – making it a criminal offence for anyone working with children in a regulated environment to fail to report any abuse they witness or are told about – was to be brought before Parliament by the previous government in 2024, albeit as a measure that would sanction individuals by banning them from working with children rather than being a criminal offence. However, the summer 2024 general election was called before this measure could become law. 

Another key reform that appears to have been derailed by the general election is the recommendation that data collection be standardised across the country to make it easier to identify if abuse is being carried out by specific groups. Jay’s report noted that headline-grabbing sexual exploitation prosecutions ‘have involved groups of men from minority ethnic communities’, but a lack of data means it’s ‘impossible to know whether any particular ethnic group is over-represented as perpetrators of child sexual exploitation by networks’.

The previous government began work on this proposal too, setting up what former Home Secretary Suella Braverman called a ‘grooming gangs taskforce’. One issue, however, related to data collection – because a suspect’s ethnicity, often seen as one of the most important data points in this particular context, can only be determined definitively after arrest, when suspects have a right to remain silent and therefore not answer the question, data was patchy. 

In regards to this reform, Cooper says she’s working to ‘improve the accuracy and robustness of the data and analysis’.

Hilka Hollmann, an officer of the IBA Family Law Committee, says that safeguarding remains an issue because it ‘ultimately comes down to funding and putting appropriate resources in’.

‘For me, it’s about resourcing local authorities,’ says Hollmann, who’s a partner at Dawson Cornwell in London. ‘Social workers have increased workloads and what we see in the family courts is a system working at capacity when it comes to safeguarding […] Everywhere we turn resources are stretched. How do you protect vulnerable people who might already be in foster care being groomed by people who spot their vulnerability? We have to fund the care system really well.’

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