Survivors and campaigners have criticised the failure to introduce mandatory reporting for child sexual abuse in England more than 15 months after it was one of the key recommendations by a public inquiry.
None of the recommendations of the seven-year independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) has yet been implemented by the UK government, including for people working in positions of trust who fail to report allegations of abuse to face criminal sanctions.
In April last year, the home secretary said the government would seek to deliver a mandatory reporting duty as soon as possible, but while there has been a call for evidence followed by a consultation, it has not been enacted.
Critics say the greater the delay, the more abusers will go unpunished. A former pupil of Malsis preparatory school, in north Yorkshire, where students were abused over three decades by teachers David Hope and Peter Holmes, said mandatory reporting was urgently needed.
According to a court of appeal judgment, the head of Malsis told staff that any parental concerns should be directed to him and spoke to Holmes about his conduct without prompting any change in his behaviour.
The former pupil said: “The majority of people would have killed themselves by now just because of the things that he did [to me] and how I’ve been just left to fend for myself. The fact that one man knew all this and could have stopped it and yet my parents paid for the privilege of that, it makes my blood boil.
“The fact that any delay [to mandatory reporting] is potentially causing enormous amounts of crap in someone’s life, it’s just abhorrent. It should have been done years ago.”
A consultation on mandatory reporting was announced by the government in 2014, the same year IICSA was announced, and the following year the then prime minister, David Cameron, set out proposals, never enacted, to jail people in positions of responsibility for up to five years if they turned a blind eye to child abuse.
Now that the government has moved quickly to fix the injustice suffered by post office operators wrongfully convicted as a result of the Horizon IT system, after an ITV drama about it, ministers are facing pressure to act faster on the recommendations of other inquiries, including Windrush, the contaminated blood scandal and now IICSA.
The former Malsis pupil said people were uncomfortable talking about sexual abuse, whereas “you can have a cup of tea and read [a newspaper] whilst reading that story [about the Post Office]”.
Out of the 20 recommendations of IICSA, the only other one the government has committed to is a redress scheme for survivors of child sex abuse, but that too has yet to be implemented.
Jonathan West, director of the Mandate Now pressure group, said it was “incredibly frustrating” that mandatory reporting had not been introduced “as if the public inquiry wasn’t sufficient consultation by itself”. He also said the government proposal “bears no resemblance to the [IICSA] recommendation” as it suggests that those who fail to report will be referred to the Disclosure and Barring Service and/or be subject to sanctions by their professional regulator rather than face criminal liability.
“We have mandatory reporting for money laundering,” said West. “We protect our money more than we protect our children. It seems an odd sense of priorities.”
Leigh Day partner Dino Nocivelli, who has represented hundreds of child sexual abuse survivors, including Malsis pupils, said: “After listening to many abuse survivors and spending nearly £200m on IICSA, which published their final report in October 2022, it is wrong that mandatory reporting has still not been introduced.
“We need to break the silence of abuse, help survivors and protect children where we can, and mandatory reporting is an important tool to achieve these aims.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Following our consultation on mandatory reporting, which closed on 30 November, we outlined that we intend to introduce a new legal requirement for those in roles with responsibility for children to report child sexual abuse in the criminal justice bill.
“We have invested significantly in the police response to child sexual abuse, with a 20% increase in charges in the last year.”
