Dear Home Secretary
I write as the Co – founder of a European-wide network of Survivors of abuse, based here in the Midlands, and as an NGO for the United Nations Commission for the Rights of the Child in relation to child abuse.
I hear today that you are going to be making a statement in the House of Commons to illustrate your plans for the over-arching enquiry into historic child abuse in this country and I also hear that you are going to be consulting survivor groups for their input into this. We welcome this as in order for this inquiry to move forward, we believe that you are going to need to go back to grass roots.
For my organisation and in light of our involvement with the UN CRC in relation to both the Vatican cover-up of abuse and the Committee against Torture, we formally request the opportunity to meet with you to discuss the needs of the thousands of survivors from our organisation, specifically as our expertise is in relation to institutional and clergy abuse.
We take no pleasure is saying this but the truth is that the UK did not fair as well as it might have done in relation to child welfare reviews with the UN in recent years. Yet here we have a unique opportunity to show the rest of the world that we are not afraid to look under our own rocks to see what is crawling there and to deal with it in an authentic, professional, ethical and inspirational way.
What concerns our organisation is that unless this is done correctly and in a thorough and head-on manner, it will simply look like avoidance, box-ticking, additional cover-ups and will undermine the survivor community’s genuine hopes that you are the person to make this happen. If not then it will fall by the wayside as so many other so-called investigations have. Survivors are used to just having something ‘thrown at them’ to shut them up or to appease them, or because other people believe that they know what we need. This inquiry needs to break that trend once and for all.
We believe that we are at a critical and historic moment in relation to how we respond to ever-increasing covered up child abuse cases, and I believe it is up to everyone with a voice to be part of that in a brave and fearless way. This is not a palatable subject, it will be painful to hear and sad to see but to delay any further is costing lives – that is not dramatic, that is the reality and truth of the damage that is being done to survivors every single day. We do not want this inquiry to be another part of that damage.
We have been asked by the UN CRC to report back to them with developments in this arena in our country and we will continue to do that. We want to be able to say as evidence givers that the UK is doing something radical and profound in relation to child abuse and we would hope that this would be something that our government would be behind.
We respectfully believe it would be essential to meet with you and your team in the first instance to put our stance across and to have the opportunity to make our recommendations. Whilst we know that you have appointed a number of individuals to the enquiry team, we have to be very clear and say that nobody on that team speaks for our organisation as our views and professional and ethical methodologies are so vastly different. This should not preclude our ability to have a commentary in how this process evolves and we expect to be given such an opportunity before any further work or nominations to the enquiry board are made.
Yours sincerely
