Joani Reid MP wrote to John Swinney on organised child abuse in Scotland on 25 June. The text of the letter was as below:
Dear First Minister,
I am writing to you on the issue of organised child abuse in Scotland.
I wrote to you before on this issue in the first half of April – over 50 working days ago – and have no record of a reply. So, I will begin by reiterating my request from that letter: that the Scottish Government should urgently move to replicate the provisions of Clause 72 of the Crime and Policing Bill, namely the duty on all adults to report suspected child sexual abuse.
The mandatory reporting requirement was a core recommendation of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, chaired by Professor Alexis Jay. As Professor Jay is your government’s senior adviser on social work, I know you will understand and accept her bona fides. And although the inquiry did not cover Scotland, there are no good reasons at all to believe that her recommendation would not apply here too.
It is extraordinary that your government seems so reluctant to actually do this. I must again insist that you act to legislate to place such a duty into Scots law with all due haste.
Secondly, I write to raise the need for a wide-ranging inquiry into child sexual abuse in Scotland, in parallel with (or even as part of) the one that will now be established for England following the recommendations of Baroness Louise Casey’s audit, published last week.
The need for this is urgent, as it is very plain we have limited information about the scale of organised child abuse in Scotland. That cannot be allowed to continue.
When I raised this last week, I was subjected to a barrage of abuse by SNP-linked figures. My purpose is not to make a party political point – this is far too important for that – but to ask that you, as that party’s leader, use your authority to make it clear that this will not be approached by you as a matter of party advantage, and nor will you tolerate a defensive attitude that refuses to concede there is a problem in Scotland, or promote the idea of Scottish exceptionalism that asserts that somehow or other the misogyny that drives so much child sexual abuse does not exist here.
I also want to answer the points that were raised with me in response to my call for an inquiry in Scotland.
Firstly, that there already is a Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. As you will know, this is limited by its terms of reference: “we cannot look at anything outwith these,” as the inquiry itself states.
Those terms state that the inquiry exists “to investigate the nature and extent of abuse of children whilst in care in Scotland, during the relevant time frame.” In other words, it is restricted in which children it can consider.
And it can only look at abuse that occurred before 17 December 2014 – so nothing that happened in the last decade or more can be considered.
Plainly, this indicates that the Scottish inquiry, whilst it may be doing good work, is not viable as a body to examine organised child abuse in Scotland.
Secondly, that as I had voted against a Conservative motion to establish an inquiry in January, my motivations in demanding an inquiry in Scotland now are purely opportunistic.
Let me deal with this in three ways.
One, the simple fact is that the Conservative motion stated that “this House … declines to give a Second Reading to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.” In other words, to back this demand for an inquiry, I would have had to abandon legislation to improve the safeguarding and welfare of children, to improve support for children leaving care, to improve the regulation of care workers and care establishments, to better regulate the teaching profession, to establish breakfast clubs, to limit the cost of school uniforms, and much else besides. Obviously, I was not going to do that.
Two, the motion would not have established any sort of inquiry, nor even have required the government to set one up, nor did it even state that its wished-for inquiry would cover Scotland. In other words, it was little more than a further piece of verbiage about the need for one.
And three – perhaps most importantly in the current debate – there is new evidence to support the need for an inquiry now, which did not exist even as recently as January. As Baroness Casey herself said last week to Sky News:
> “At the time [January] I thought to myself the last thing we need is another big national inquiry. It’s like, if there are people out there committing these crimes let’s spend the money we have got on going after them. If there’s a safety net that needs improving for kids in care, let’s spend the money … so it wasn’t a political thing for me. It’s just like, I don’t see the necessity of this … The thing is the more I got into it and the more I looked at the data … I felt more and more frustrated and I thought … if that takes a statutory inquiry I’m going to go and get one.”
The third issue raised about my call for an inquiry in Scotland was the existence of the Scottish Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Strategic Group. Perhaps this group does do good work – I have no reason to think otherwise – but the group has only met once this year and can hardly be thought of as a mechanism to get to the bottom of the scale of organised child sexual abuse in Scotland.
My request to you is to put aside party interest and deal directly with the serious and well-founded concerns that organised child sexual abuse in Scotland is a widespread problem – and that it certainly is not confined to only children in care, or to events that ended in December 2014.
Generations of children – particularly girls and young women – have been betrayed by a state that dismissed their cries for help. At one end of the betrayal process, misogyny and class prejudice against made it far too easy for the men (and it was mostly men) to refuse to listen. At the other were the men who burrowed within state institutions with the specific purpose of finding children to abuse. So far, we have directed all our efforts towards the latter group and ignored the culpability of the former.
That must change.
In view of the public interest in these matters, it is my intention to release this letter to the media once I know it has been received by your office.
