UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Helen Pidd
Monday 13 July 2015
Alexis Jay officially retired two years ago – not that you’d notice. In 2013 she stepped down from her role as Scotland’s chief social work adviser, shortly after being awarded an OBE. But rather than tending to her garden she ended up digging up horrific claims of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. That job done, the scalps of many officials taken, she moved on to sort out Northern Ireland’s safeguarding children boards.
But last week the 66-year-old began her biggest task yet, when she joined the panel of what has been described as Britain’s most complicated and wide-reaching statutory inquiry ever. The independent inquiry into child sex abuse (IICSA) is expected to take five years investigating claims of abuse in faith and religious organisations, the criminal justice system, local authorities and national institutions such as the BBC, NHS and Ministry of Defence.
Jay was one of the first names confirmed as part of the panel. So mammoth is the task that last week the government committed £17.9m to cover the next year of the inquiry alone. “I think it’s very complex and I don’t under-estimate the scope of the inquiry. It’s huge. Very wide ranging,” she says, when I meet her in Glasgow.She is under no illusions about how tough the new gig is – not least because the inquiry had such a rocky start, losing the support of victims very early on, along with its first two chairs, who were found to be too close to the establishment figures they would be investigating. But Jay, who is a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde’s Centre For Excellence For Looked After Children, insists she is determined. “I am passionately committed to it taking place and to the victims and survivors, and to get justice and truth out of the process,” she says.
Almost a year on from the televised press conference at Rotherham football club that made her name, Jay still can’t believe the rumpus her report caused. Taking her place in front of a cluster of microphones last August with a leopard-print iPad, she read out a statement to the assembled press corps revealing that, by her conservative estimate, 1,400 children had been sexually exploited in Rotherham over a 16-year period.
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