UNITED KINGDOM
Guardian
Barbara Ellen
Since Dame Lowell Goddard became the third person to resign as chair of the independent inquiry into child abuse (IICA), much time and energy has been wasted denigrating her for “bailing”, and sniping about her salary, her lack of grasp of British law and the extended “holidays” at home in New Zealand.
Presumably at some point, it will be revealed exactly what happened. The only thing that matters right now is that her appointment has failed, as did then-home secretary Theresa May’s other appointments, Lady Elizabeth Butler-Sloss (strong establishment links, including a brother who was lord chancellor during the era being scrutinised), and Dame Fiona Woolf (accused of too close an association with the late Leon Brittan, who was being investigated). What a hot mess, and it’s not the only one.
The IICA was established, post-Savile, to investigate how public bodies and established institutions handled their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse. Now not only is a new chair needed, but so too arguably is a completely fresh approach. The inquiry has been widely criticised for becoming overwhelmingly broad in scope, complex, incoherent, impractical, and expensive. Reading about the IICA in detail is not only to invite a pounding headache, but also to understand why Lowell Goddard resigned, and why there’s not a stampede to take over the job.
A recurring criticism is that the inquiry has become so overblown and complicated as to doom it to eventual failure. It’s a fair point. Then again, what did people expect? This was always going to be a wide-ranging, multi-faceted, decades-spanning historical inquiry, requiring painstaking investigation, involving personal testimonies from multitudes of abuse survivors and third parties. What screams “quick and simple” about any of that?
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