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Child protection Protecting our children - a free guide for parents
Children are getting safer - child abuse nowadays compared to the past. (A local case study from the Bristol Evening Post) Because we hear so much more about child abuse in the media nowadays, it would be easy to make the mistake that the problem was worse than ever before. Thankfully this is not correct - it may be being reported and written about more frequently and in much more detail, but compared to the past fewer children in the UK are being harmed. However, any abuse is of course too much and completely unacceptable. Today's children have
probably never been safer, as the secrecy abusers depend upon to keep
from getting detected and caught, is being removed through better public
knowledge and tougher and more effective new laws introduced by the Labour
government. A good example of how things have changed for the better is to look at how today the media, the police, social services and charities, take allegations of suspected abuse in places like children's homes much more seriously. Just consider how today, allegations of abuse in children's homes are treated as a very high priority and widely reported in the media eg the 2008 case of a former children's home in the Channel Islands. Now compare this to the account of the former Director of Social Services for Avon, Wally Harbert, who spoke to the Bristol Evening Post about the difficulty of stopping abuse in local children's establishments during the 1980s. You will read that as a young man in his 20s, North East Somerset area MP, Dan Norris, helped uncover the serious child abuse that was taking place and spoke out to the authorities. A key reason why Dan takes a tough line on paedophiles and works so hard to remove secrecy to better protect today's children. Abuse was covered up for years ...... from the Bristol Evening Post A former social services boss has spoken out for the first time about a cover-up of child abuse at a special needs school. Wally Harbert, who retired in 1990 as director of social services from the now-defunct Avon County Council, has handed the Evening Post a damning dossier on the behaviour of his senior management in the 1970s and 1980s. The 120-page dossier says that people in charge of the welfare of boys as young as 11 would not act on serious allegations of abuse by staff at the Kingswood Campus. The scandal was finally uncovered when Dan Norris, now the MP for Wansdyke, was working there after graduating from university and alerted the authorities, despite facing serious intimidation. A subsequent inquiry led to a major police investigation and several arrests, with one staff member jailed for eight years. Mr Harbert said that at the time he was director of social services there was a culture of denial among staff that there could be a problem at the school, which closed at the end of the 1980s. The campus, off Britannia Road, was divided into a training centre, assessment centre and a secure unit for delinquent boys. The police inquiry, called Operation React, uncovered abuse ranging from physical violence to sexual abuse by some staff. Mr Harbert said: "When I tried to tell people what was happening, I was told that I did not understand the kind of pressure the staff at the school were under and that it was a very difficult area to work in. I was told that I must have been mistaken and not to take it any further. "It was the people running the unit who were telling me that it was not an issue, even when there were serious allegations made about staff behaviour. "I tried to have one teacher sacked because of his behaviour towards the boys and his inappropriate relationship with some of them. But the council's solicitors phoned me to tell me I could not do that. "The problem was that the kind of people who were hired to look after the children were not trained to deal with their needs - people like ex-bouncers, some of whom took a more punitive approach. "Senior managers in the schools did not always probe as deeply as required when unsatisfactory behaviour by staff was suspected or reported. Things were covered up and people chose not to believe the accusations from the boys. "It was only when Operation React took place that the extent of the abuse was discovered, and that was 10 years after the initial inquiry. "It was only when Operation React took place that the extent of the abuse was discovered, and that was 10 years after the initial inquiry. "There were some people who were trying to do something about it but couldn't because of the way things were run." More than 200 men claimed they had been abused at the Kingswood Campus. In October 2002, Peter Brook, aged 55, was jailed for eight years after admitting a number of sex offences against young boys at three care homes, including Kingswood. One witness who was at the unit in 1973, when he was 12 years old, spoke of daily abuse and a harsh regime. But when boys tried to write a letter to somebody to speak out, their mail was censored. Operation React has now wound down following the conviction of Brook and others connected to care homes in Somerset and Devon. Mr Harbert said he hoped some lessons from the past may be learned for the future and that children are taken seriously when they claim they have been abused. Avon County Council was disbanded in 1996. Social services in the area are now run by South Gloucestershire Council, which was not in existence at the time of the scandal. Published by Bristol Evening Post, 9 November 2004 |