UNITED KINGDOM
Newsweek
By Leah McGrath Goodman 11/4/15
Investigators probing thousands of allegations of child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom set up a website this past summer to gather evidence. They invited survivors to share their stories with the independent inquiry through what was promised to be a secure and confidential portal.
Many survivors did so. But somehow nearly three weeks of submissions were mysteriously deleted, “instantly and permanently,” in what a notice on the site in October said was due to “a change in our website address.”
That message caused survivors, support groups and members of the British Parliament to question whether the survivors’ data was being handled with the utmost care, with attention to privacy and security—not to mention why there wasn’t some kind of data backup. The inquiry’s request for people to resubmit their stories was met with skepticism.
“It is a known fact that it takes survivors of child abuse 20, 30, 40 years to recover or to report it,” says abuse survivor Andrew Kershaw. “They have to trust, and unfortunately many of them will never trust, never tell anyone what happened to them, and take it to their grave. So their information being lost has done irreparable damage, has taken away their trust once more. Many won’t come forward again.”
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