Seven and a half years after it began, the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse has delivered its final report. The testimony of victims, said Prof Alexis Jay, was “almost unbearable” to witness. The stories uncovered have been of limitless cruelty, deviousness and negligence. The inquiry’s course has been rough. When she was appointed in 2015, Prof Jay was the fourth person in the job. Some survivors and lawyers withdrew their cooperation from a process they saw as an establishment stitch-up. But a vast amount of evidence was presented, including by 6,200 victims and survivors. The findings must now be confronted.
These include vicious behaviour by many individuals including priests, teachers and foster carers. But the reason why child sexual abuse became the scandal that it did is that so many institutions were complicit. Again and again, those with information and knowledge that abuse was happening chose to remain silent. Sometimes, for example, in both the Catholic and Anglican churches, senior figures chose to protect abusers by enabling them to move positions rather than be exposed. In the case of Jimmy Savile, who preyed on young women for years while working for the BBC, a whole organisation closed ranks.
