UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Alan Travis, home affairs editor
theguardian.com, Monday 14 July 2014
In just a week, Lady Butler-Sloss, Theresa May’s choice to chair the inquiry into historical child sex abuse, has been swept aside by a media tide of allegations of personal conflicts of interest.
When the home secretary first announced her appointment in the Commons only last Monday it had seemed there were few people more qualified than the retired appeal court judge, who had been the highest-ranking female judge in Britain and the president of the family division, and had chaired the Cleveland inquiry into child abuse.
May had made clear that as far as she was concerned the inquiry was not being set up to replicate a police investigation into claims of a child sex ring at Westminster. Instead she said its job was to consider whether public bodies such as the NHS, the BBC and non-state institutions such as the churches “had taken seriously their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse”.
It was widely expected that Butler-Sloss, 80, would convene a panel of legal and child protection experts, and come up with recommendations on child policy to ensure that a Jimmy Savile or a Stuart Hall could not get away with what they did for so long ever again.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.