The more time you spend looking at government policy, the more you realise how much of its intervention is recklessly short term, ignores the evidence and attempts to fix the problem when it’s staring us in the face, rather than prevent it escalating. Many years of it has left me a pretty hardened cynic: it takes a lot to surprise me when it comes to things the state should be doing, but doesn’t.
But I was left shocked after I recently attended a briefing from the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse in my capacity as a trustee of the Indigo Trust (which gives it some funding). Slide after slide highlighted how we are failing children who are being subjected to sexual abuse at the most basic level and, if anything, these failures are getting worse.
