We Have Failed Our Children

Again I say that Gillick competence ought to be called Thatcher competence, after the woman who fought for it rather than the woman who fought against it. The firmly leftish people who have been taking issue with it forever are finally being given a hearing. Catherine Lafferty writes:

How did the depraved cruelty of Britain’s grooming gangs go on for so long, so openly and with such seeming impunity? One overlooked but vitally important element of the scandal is that over the past 30 years the lines of defence girls had against sex crimes were deliberately taken down in the drive to reduce the country’s number of teenage pregnancies.

The first and most important line of defence any girl will have against male predation is usually her own family. The first step in dismantling these defences came in 1985 when Victoria Gillick, a Catholic housewife, wanted assurances from her local health authority that her underage daughters would not be given contraceptives without her knowledge and consent. She lost the case and consequently the Law Lords, led by Lord Fraser, set new guidelines under which underage sex would be officially tolerated as long as pregnancies were prevented.

The Fraser guidelines were hailed by the teen sex lobby, which claimed they would usher in a world of empowered young women and falling teenage pregnancy rates. But things didn’t go according to their confident forecasts and by 1997 Britain’s stubbornly high teenage pregnancy rate was the stuff of dozens of newspaper columns and radio phone-ins.

What to do next was obvious: intensify the policy. The incoming Blair government gave itself a ten-year strategy to halve teen pregnancy rates. There were taskforces, advisory groups, interim targets, targets, annual reports, workshops and drop-in centres.

Confidentiality was central to the teenage pregnancy strategy. Yet secrecy is also an abuser’s most effective cloak. A court case in the mid-2000s expanded the boundaries of teenage sex confidentiality even further. Like Gillick, it was brought by another mother called Sue Axon, who fought a legal battle for parents to have the right to know if their underage daughters were being given abortion advice. Axon lost her case in 2006. It had been opposed by the then health secretary Patricia Hewitt, who in an earlier incarnation had been general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties when it was friendly with the Paedophile Information Exchange, as well as by the Family Planning Association (FPA). ‘Confidentiality is the single most important factor in a young person’s decision to visit a health service,’ said Anne Weyman, chief executive of FPA. ‘Compulsory parental notification of their visit would have been a disaster.’ 

That was not a view that would be shared by the authors of the Rochdale Serious Case Review, which reported in 2013 that ‘the drive to reduce teenage pregnancy… is believed to have contributed to a culture whereby professionals may have become inured to early sexual activity in young teenagers’.

Multiple serious case reviews found the focus on driving pregnancy rates down with confidential contraception and abortions meant that teenage girls who presented signs of sexual exploitation were dismissed because the assumption was that underage sexual activity was harmless, so long as the risk of pregnancy was minimised. Torbay’s Serious Case Review observed: ‘Underage sexual activity by young people between 13 and 16 years old is judged on the perception that if it takes place with partners of a similar age, it is by mutual consent. This perception has to be reconsidered in light of the growing evidence in this case that the abusers were not much older than the girls.’ Revelations continue rolling in. GB News have reported that one victim claims she was forced by a male police officer to take the morning-after pill when she reported her abuse.

In October 2005, the then education secretary, Ruth Kelly, tried to reverse the tide by proposing that every time anyone under the age of consent asked for advice on sex, contraception and abortion, the police would be notified. Her suggestion was shot down in flames by the teen sex lobby. ‘Any erosion of young people’s rights to confidential sexual health advice and treatment would be disastrous,’ said Jan Barlow, the chief executive of the Brook sexual health advisory centres.

It is clear now that the official recommendation as best practice for preventing pregnancies in underage girls was in direct conflict with safeguarding their best interests. Yet, according to the prevailing Fraser regime, the agencies that had declined to notify the police about underage sex had done nothing wrong.

And Michael Merrick writes:

They say that revolutions happen slowly at first, and then all at once. It has certainly seemed this way since Elon Musk began tweeting in disgust at what might well become the biggest scandal to have hit our governing classes since the advent of democratic politics. The sheer depravity of the child abuse scandal, coupled with the systemic failures of those who for years turned a blind eye, has acted as a kind of shock therapy — reports long published, tragic stories long reported, have suddenly found a new resonance, a new power to upend polite liberal society.

The immediate focus has been on the racial characteristics of the perpetrators and their victims, an encapsulation of grievances that have been bubbling away under the surface of a growing ethnonationalist politics. The whole gamut of accusations — two-tier justice, state prejudice against the “indigenous” inhabitants of these islands, elite indifference to the tragic plight of their white kith and kin — all pressed into service as some have sought to make political use of this tragedy. And in all honesty, there is an uncomfortable truth that cannot be denied: working-class girls — white working-class girls — have been treated like white trash by both their abusers and the state that ought to have protected them.

Perhaps this is the inevitable destination of progressive politics, an abandonment of hierarchical noblesse oblige from a class of activists and legislators who no longer feel filial commitment to what has become an underclass within their own societies. For so long, the ears and eyes of the ruling classes have been unmoved by the plights of those on their doorstep, even whilst being hyperactively engaged with racial tragedy and injustice over the other side of the Atlantic.

Be that as it may, the collective mind is now turning to how we could let this happen. Yet the initial diagnosis seems to leave too much unanswered, not least how so many educated professionals could contrive — repeatedly, across time and place — to rationalise away the horrors happening before their eyes. No, a further explanation is required: the uncomfortable truth is that officials did not only remain passive out of fear of being called racist — rather, they were proactive in explaining away warning signs that ought to have shaken them from indifference.

Reading through so many of the harrowing cases, one sees time and again a facilitating creed which has worked its way into the values codes of our governing elites. In short, the doctrine of the age — sex is empowerment, consent its lodestar — have burst free of chronological frameworks and tragically shaped the way we decide what, and what is not, acceptable or safe for children. Categories that, in theory if more than practice, mediate the behaviours of free and consenting adults, have created a language and a logic disrespectful of legalistic definitions of what is age-appropriate. The adults have brought their values to work with them. Our children have become sexualised.

Thus one sees the perverseness of a class of educated professionals determining that underage sexual activity could be “healthy and normal”, that children had given consent, that harm could be mitigated through both proactive and reactive provision of “healthcare”, that risk could be managed by normalising and domesticating such activity rather than identifying it as abuse and ending it. The examples of this latter category, of children being assessed and analysed as if they were consenting adults, are extensive and repeated; the foster carers described in the Casey Report as allowing an abuser to continue a relationship with a child in their care, even inviting him on holiday, the social worker allegedly attending a “wedding” of a child to her abuser when she was just 15 years old, the police officers referring to underage girls as “little slags” or telling a parent that an older Asian boyfriend was a “fashion accessory”.

Chesterton once posited that euphemism was a way for the educated to make palatable that which, when said in simple terms, would shock and appal. So it is that the same culture that could justify giving medical advice to a 12-year-old seeking contraceptives to continue her relationship with a 20-year-old — as Professor David Hall told a Joint Committee meeting before admitting the doctor involved would then probably immediately call their union — also decided time and again facilitate such abuse under the guise of “healthcare”. As Lucy Allen, former MP for Telford, said in a Westminster Hall Debate on child sexual exploitation:

We must move away from victim blaming and shaming and recognise that these were children who were victims of a crime. We must change our perception of the victims. Too often, assumptions were made that the young girls were making choices to have regular underage sex. We see, for example, GPs handing out morning-after pills to the same young girls week after week, without asking questions, simply assuming that it is a choice the girls are making. It is wrong to blame children as young as 12 for ‘indulging in risky behaviour’ or label them as sexually promiscuous. That is completely wrong.

There is a difference between safe systems and safe cultures. The latter identifies the risks to which the former responds. We are only ever as safe as the culture which recognises what we need to be kept safe from. We must confront our fallenness in all its grim reality: thousands of professionals, across multiple sectors, in countless places, over decades, took the view that a child having sex was not a risk if it was done safely. To declare otherwise was to be at risk of those most modern of heresies — to be prudish, to be judgmental, to be racist.

The heavy lifting on any introspection must come from police, social and health services. They have been at the forefront of keeping children safe and have manifestly failed, repeatedly, to do so.

But my business is schooling, and I fear that we have uncomfortable truths of our own to confront. We do not find ourselves immune from this catastrophe. We form a majority part of that infrastructure which exists to support every child and keep them safe – they spend more time with us than any other organ of the state. And this has happened to children in our schools, across the country, and at a scale it is difficult to fathom. Children were being picked up from the school gates, abusers were attending schools at the end of the day hoping to snare their next victim, children within schools were fully aware that their peers were being abused, and at times it was “healthcare services” initiated or provided from within schools that, however well-meaning, facilitated and mitigated the abuse children endured.

Education sits downstream of culture. Schools are not (or are no longer) what Oakeshott might have described as a “world apart”, with their own codes and mores distinct from the practical concerns of ordinary life, a shining city on a hill leading society to loftier cultural heights; rather, they reflect and propagate the prestige social faith of their time. Our schools do not lead the culture, but replicate it; they do as the wider mores dictate, as the wider legal framework insists, as the curriculum and resources — from groups like Brook, or the Family Planning Association, or the Sex Education Forum — permit.

This is certainly not to say schools are careless in safeguarding. Quite the opposite; safeguarding in education is widespread, comprehensive and diligent. It is a core responsibility of schools, much to the chagrin of traditionalists who wish schools to focus only on intellectual matters and of parents fending off questions from schools rightly following protocols for an unexplained absence or an innocuous injury.

But as we now know, our children have not been kept safe. As the excellent report Unprotected, produced by the Family Education Trust, has explored in comprehensive detail, we find ourselves at a cultural, ethical and legislative muddle that has normalised a set of values and assumptions which have made our children less safe — and our most vulnerable children particularly so. Successive governments have provided guidance and legislation that has normalised underage sexual activity, that has given schools the green light to provide access to contraception and abortion without parental knowledge, and all too many have duly fallen into line.

How can it be, for example, that there are schools who would phone home to request parental permission to give paracetamol, but not necessarily the morning-after pill; that schools would happily hand out condoms without parental consent, but would draw the line at Calpol?

This is not something talked about too openly in education — it is the quiet part of the job, finding solutions to difficult “problems”, acting out of compassion or pastoral prudence. The whole edifice of state services points in the same direction — delivered in multi-agency meetings, in non-judgemental “chats”, in referrals to external agencies, in euphemisms such as “confidentiality” and “healthcare” which too often just means keeping parental oversight and protection out of reach. The possible and rare exception of a parent from whom a child may need to be kept safe, thus justifying the confidentiality, has proved the Trojan horse through which all too many a secret has been kept.

This may seem fanciful, but it is true for all that. From Gillick competence to the Fraser guidelines and on to the Sexual Offences Act 2003, there is the legislative framework to enable these policies. Even for those children ensconced in supportive, vigilant families, this has created a culture of expectation and opportunity — for girls in particular — that has increased pressure to conform to the pornified expectations of wider society. As Unprotected outlines in detail, some girls have found themselves in unhealthy relationships precisely because of what was told to them, and given to them, at school. Or as one child puts it, on discussing the impact of distributing contraceptives to children without parental knowledge:

I took the morning-after pill when I was 13 because I was too young to even think of getting pregnant. I thought it was responsible. But boys push you into sex by saying you can take it the next day.

It is not a coincidence that in an era of unprecedented focus on safeguarding and child wellbeing in schools, there have now been two system-level safeguarding scandals that have occurred on our watch. Just as that underlying web of values have inhibited our ability to recognise the warning signs of child abuse and exploitation, so we also find our education system emerging from the gender-identity wars with their operational dignity barely intact. Then, as now, the imputation of progressive social assumptions over and against parental rights and child protection has exposed children to lifelong consequences — then, as now, it was in the name of compassion that such “support” was provided.

Why has this not consumed us? Why have we not been raising the alarm? Because like the metaphorical frog in the boiling pot, we have accepted incremental changes that align with the permissive ethic of the age without noticing the cumulative impact on effective safeguarding for children.

This is why any challenge now would inevitably find itself caught up in the rights discourse of adults, not children; the exact same discourse that brought us here in the first place. After all, it was adults demanding children have free access to the markers of progressive empowerment against the patriarchal or the reactionary — for which read contraception and access to abortion — and it is this same litany of liberal shibboleths that shields the status quo from adequate scrutiny. Whilst there has been pockets of parental resistance — most notably on debates around curriculum resources — these challenges have not imperilled underlying assumptions but have instead reaffirmed them, reassuring a progressive sector that parents are bastions of the retrograde.

The theologian Henri de Lubac once noted that we too often think we need a cure when perhaps what we really need is a conversion. In light of the horrors brought to public attention over these last couple of weeks, it is surely true to say that we need a revolution. We have failed our children.