A Process of Continual Improvement

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COUNCILLORS ON ST HELENA OUTRAGED BY UK NEWSPAPER ARTICLE

St Helena Island ‘Falsely Portrayed’

St Helena’s Executive Council – comprising Councillors Ian Rummery, Wilson Duncan, Christine Scipio-O’Dean, Lawson Henry and Brian Isaac – have reacted strongly to a story about St Helena in today’s Daily Mail regarding child protection and sexual offences. Council believes that the article paints a totally untrue picture of the Island, much of it based on hearsay.

Executive Council said:

“Today’s Daily Mail portrays a false and totally unbalanced image of St Helena, and has angered St Helenians, both on-Island and overseas. Those who live on St Helena recognise that there are issues around child protection and sexual crime, but also know that they live in a remarkably peaceful and safe community, a fact invariably noted by visitors to the Island.

“St Helena has the same issues as any other jurisdiction and has made strong progress over the past few years in dealing with and prosecuting sex offenders and improving child protection.

“The two reports cited by the Daily Mail in fact demonstrate a process of continual improvement. We investigate all sexual allegations and anyone found guilty faces the full force of the law. Numerous prosecutions of sex offenders over the past few years demonstrate this.

“The Council has every confidence in the Police force on the Island, which benefits from excellent leadership. We resent the insinuation in the newspaper that somehow the Police do not take sex offences seriously. Quite the opposite is the truth.

“Executive Councillors recognise the commitment of Legislative Council, St Helena Police, Social Services, the Governor, the FCO and all others involved, in taking child protection and sexual crime very seriously. All of us are working hard to improve safeguarding on St Helena, and are very disappointed in the obvious bias in today’s newspaper story. 

“And there has been no attempt to somehow cover up the findings of these reports. Their findings have been well publicised on the Island and Councillors have held public and media debates on these issues. To suggest that there is a reluctance to engage in issues around child safeguarding, somehow linked to a wish not to damage tourism, is absurd.

“Councillors and Government here welcome any objective and independent review of our current arrangements. Recommendations in both the reports cited have been implemented and are now well embedded on the Island. There is always more to do and we are not complacent, but the fact remains that child safeguarding provisions on St Helena are stronger now than they have ever been. The way cases are assembled, supervised and prosecuted has been reformed, as have training and professional standards. In addition, our various agencies here are now working closely together to review historic cases. It is a shame that this excellent work went unrecognised in the Daily Mail.”

Councillor and Children’s Champion Christine Scipio-O’Dean concluded:

“We are all alarmed by the inflammatory and biased reporting in the article published today. We have taken great steps on St Helena to protect our children and vulnerable people against abuse of any kind. We know that there are concerns, as there are in any community, but solid progress has been made in improving our safeguarding capabilities. We know there is still more to do, and we will continue to strive for further improvements.”

The St Helena portrayed in the Mail's farrago of unattributed material is utterly unrecognisable to anyone with any knowledge of the real place.

I am not saying that child abuse, sexual exploitation and domestic violence do not exist there. They exist everywhere.

But the only person to say anything openly in this report says that they were less common there than in Britain, and specifically than in the leafy South of England. Anyone who knows St Helena knows that he is right.

Several "quotations" to the contrary have obviously been made up, and let us not forget with which newspaper we are dealing here.

The Mail clearly has some Taxpayers' Alliance-type campaign against the airport, and it is following the logic of that position by opposing the defence of the Falkland Islands.

Plus, of course, there is the need to distract from the Thatcher Government, relatives of the members of which, as such, are now deemed unfit to investigate these matters.

If this report were even vaguely true, then the entire population of St Helena would have to be in some way complicit, just as the entire population of Ireland would have to be if such reports were true, and just as the entire population of Britain would have to be if such reports were true.

If there were that much of it about, then it would be normal behaviour. But there is not. It is not. It is deviant behaviour produced by deviant ideology and deviant institutions. In Britain. In Ireland. And, on the tiny scale that it exists at all there, in St Helena.