An 8 minute read by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale.
We have recently published two posts about the wall of silence that has long protected sexual abuse in Britain. The first was about the Archbishop of Canterbury and dozens of other church officials covered up the gruesome physical and sexual abuse of many boys and young men. The second was about how Jimmy Savile’s abuse was covered up for decades. This post looks at another example of that wall of silence – the way that the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the sexual abuse of children was effectively buried.
THE INQUIRY
The story starts with Sir Jimmy Savile. After his death in 2011 his abuse of many hundreds of girls was revealed. Some consented, some did not, and many were under the age of consent – 16 in Britain. He raped girls at his work for the BBC, in several different hospitals, and in many different institutions.
It is another example of the wall of silence on abuse. We have just published a short read that summarizes this appalling story here.
When Savile’s predation was finally revealed publicly in 2012, there was a strong scandal, partly because so many British people had known for a long time that sexual assaults on young people were regularly covered up. There was a real possibility of spreading exposures of other cases, and of journalists asking how and why Margaret Thatcher, police and prosecutors had allowed and thus enabled Savile’s abuse.
Moreover, scandals were radiating outwards, with new revelations about new abusers. Pressure for some form of investigation of these cases of abuse grew. In 2014 the Conservative Home Secretary, Theresa May, set up an inquiry into historic abuse of children.
There was, however, an outcry because the inquiry did not have powers to subpoena witnesses or documents. The first chair of the inquiry, Baroness Butler-Sloss, resigned a week after taking the job, because the press reported that her brother was a former Conservative Attorney General who had lost important documents about sexual abuse in government circles.
Her replacement, the second chair, resigned after eight weeks. This time the press reported on her friendship with a former cabinet minister who was under suspicion. It should be said that we now know he was probably innocent. At this point the government let it be known that they were considering scrapping the inquiry. Uproar followed. In 2015 Theresa May changed the name of the inquiry to an “Independent Commission of Inquiry” with the power to subpoena witnesses and documents.
A new chair was appointed. Dame Lowell Goddard was a high court judge from New Zealand. The hope was that she would be free of the unfortunate personal links that seemed common among the great and the good in London.
COMMISSIONS
A commission is a tried and tested remedy for British governments. The commission spends many years taking evidence. All politicians refuse to comment on the issue until the inquiry is concluded. Eventually the commission would deliver a report with lessons learned – and with recommendations for the future which are never put into practice. No one is prosecuted for wrongdoing. The government is seen to be doing something, but nothing is done, and with luck the problem eventually goes away.
The method has served the British establishment well for many years. And yet, similar commissions on child abuse in other countries have had devastating effects.
In Canada a commission into the physical, sexual and racist abuse in residential schools for First Nation children had an enormous impact. That commission did not come out of nowhere. It grew out of years of organizing by native survivors in communities all over the country. Eventually, every indigenous child who had attended a residential school won financial compensation.[1]
In Ireland an official report into sexual abuse by Catholic priests and monks led to widespread open hatred for the clergy and changed the whole of Irish politics for the better.[2] In 2018 Pope Francis did the same and roughly 150,000 came, a fall of 85%.
Australia is also a majority Catholic country, mainly because of the number of Irish immigrants. In 2014 the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Sexual Abuse began work. Over the next five years they held 8,013 private interviews with people who had been abused – in effect, everyone who wanted to testify. There were six commissioners, eminent and distinguished men and women. One of those six sat in on every interview.
One result of that commission in Australia was the prosecution of Cardinal Pell, the highest ranking cleric in the world ever to face a court. The jury convicted Pell, though the appeal judges overturned the result.
These commissions all allowed testimony by any survivor of abuse, either private or public. The British commission did not. They said they simply ‘did not have resources’, which only means the government was unwilling to spend the money.
But the Conservative government were also aware that allowing testimony by any survivor what such a policy would open the floodgates. Instead of listening to survivors’ testimony, their model was limited and not a public investigation. The commission received complaints about some 400 institutions. They investigated fifteen.
Their terms of reference required the British commission to refer every complaint to a special police investigation. They referred 10,541 cases. By the time the commission wrapped up its work, these cases had resulted in over 100 convictions, with another 40 people awaiting trial.[3] This is a very low rate of convictions.
More fundamentally, the principle of non-public investigations is simply wrong. Survivors want to testify so that what was done to them is known. They want a public apology, to them, from the organisations and people who allowed the abuse to happen and covered up afterwards. Many also want a conviction. But many of those people still do not want to go through the heartache and potential humiliation of a process with an uncertain outcome.
In Britain, the commission did publish some reports about individual cases. These attracted almost no attention. Crucially, there was no investigation into Savile’s case. There was no public grilling of the managers who had permitted and thus encouraged Savile’s abuse. There was no testimony from the police officers who worked on investigations into Savile, none from the senior police officers who decided whether or not to send the evidence to prosecutors, or none from the senior prosecutors who squashed the cases sent to them.
All of this testimony would have been electric. It would have allowed angry lower ranking cops and lawyers to tell the truth, and their bosses to twist in the wind of their own lies.
The documentary trail must be enormous. None of the letters and emails have been published. Margaret Thatcher is now dead, but many of her colleagues and civil servants are still alive.
There should also have been serious, and public, investigation into the accusations of police corruption and police officers who protected Savile, and into what the managers in charge of the BBC, Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Broadmoor Hospital and St. James Hospital in Leeds were told, and what they did. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of nurses and survivors, would have lined up to give that evidence.
DAME GODDARD’S RESIGNATION
Dame Lowell Goddard resigned as chair of the Commission 16 months after taking office. She gave almost no explanation. Her resignation letter to Amber Rudd, the new home secretary, was the shortest we have ever seen. It read, in its entirety:
Dear Home Secretary,
I regret to advise that I am offering you my resignation as Chair of the Independent Inquiry into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse, with immediate effect. I trust you will accept this decision.
Hon Dame Lowell Goddard QC
Goddard put out a slightly longer public statement later the same day which included the words:
“The conduct of any public inquiry is not an easy task, let alone one of the magnitude of this. Compounding the many difficulties was its legacy of failure which has been very hard to shake off and with hindsight it would have been better to have started completely afresh.”
Whatever that means.
We published a post at the time entitled Something Smells. The press coverage at the time said roughly the same thing, although more politely.
Immediately afterwards, the chief lawyer for the inquiry was sacked for complaining internally about the constraints on investigations. The fourth chair, Alexis Jay, served until the end.
During these years, there were regular rumours that the Commission was an unhappy place to work, many survivors and activists expressed reservations about the process, and some blamed the close control by Home Office civil servants.
The commission brought out their final report in 2022, after seven years of work and procrastination. The Commission’s Final Report was released on the same day that Liz Truss resigned as prime minister after only 45 days in office. That meant there was very little coverage, and by the next day the report had disappeared from the news cycle. The report made 20 recommendations, almost all minor, none of which have been implemented.
BORIS JOHNSON
In 2021, a year before the publication of the final report, the serving Prime Minister, Boris Johnson (Eton and Oxford) said on television that the money spent on the inquiry had been wasted. Johnson did not mean the inquiry had not done enough. He meant the inquiry should never have been held.
Johnson is well known for his comic timing and his stylish turns of phrase. His precises words were that the £60 million pounds had been ‘spaffed up against a wall’. ‘Spaf’ is English slang for when a boy or man ejaculates.
Johnson carefully picked the image he wanted to put into a listener’s mind, one that would register strongly in the context of a discussion of the sexual abuse of children. Johnson cultivates an image as a naughty boy, prepared to say the unsayable. But his words also give us a condensed version of how many upper class men felt about any inquiry into sexual abuse.
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale’s most recent book is Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality.
This is one of a series of recent posts on sexual abuse in Britain. The others are The Archbishop of Canterbury, Elon Musk and Sexual Abuse in Britain and Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Savile and the Wall of Silence.
[1] For electrifying accounts of that organizing start with Bev Sellars, 2012, They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School; and Sugarcane, 2024, a documentary directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie.
[2] Fintan O’Toole, 2021, We Do Not Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland since 1958, is a brilliant account of that transformation.
[3] Alexis Jay et al, 2022, The Report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, p. 114
Anne Bonny Pirate 