UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Jonathan West
Tuesday 4 November 2014
Trust. That’s the issue. Child abuse survivors, particularly those abused in institutional settings, are often highly mistrustful and obsessively motivated. It’s hard for those not abused in childhood to understand how devastating it is to be so thoroughly betrayed by the very adults and authorities on whom you depend for your care, and how profoundly that affects your ability to trust anybody in later life.
The home secretary Theresa May’s conduct in setting up the inquiry falls far short of building the trust necessary to gain the confidence of these extremely and justifiably mistrustful people. It is clear from her statement in parliament on Monday that she isn’t close to understanding how much transparency is really needed.
Let’s start with the powers of the inquiry. May insists that the right course is a panel inquiry, which “if the chair requests” can later be converted into a statutory inquiry. And yet she claims to be absolutely determined to get to the truth on this issue. The two statements don’t go together.
Her “intention and expectation” that all government bodies will voluntarily cooperate with a panel inquiry will be met with a hollow laugh by the many people who were abused or otherwise failed by those same government bodies. Think of the trouble Alexis Jay had getting documents out of Rotherham council.
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