Mandate Now response to Government Mandatory Reporting consultation outcome:

‘Reporting and Acting on Child Abuse and Neglect: ’

The Government’s decision to reject mandatory reporting in institutional settings in favour of the current discretionary reporting system has little to do with transforming the culture of child protection in Regulated Activities and everything to do Government thinking it is minimising cost.  Government’s key objective is to deliver the smallest possible increase in child protection referrals from professionals in schools, healthcare, sports, scouts, faith groups and similar, to the Local Authority for independent triage assessment. (more…)

Mandate Now has reviewed the Church of England’s safeguarding policy document ‘Protecting All God’s Children’ 4^th Edition (2010) and its recently replaced Chapter 7 under the new heading – ‘Responding to, assessing and managing safeguarding concerns or allegations against church officers’. The content is a thicket of inconsistent discretionary ‘guidance’ which carries with it the risk of confusion, mistake and non-compliance.

Our review is available here.

Mandate Now is a pressure group that leads the agenda for the introduction of law that requires staff who have responsibility for children, and vulnerable adults, in Regulated Activities[1] to report known and suspected abuse to the Local Authority. We have reviewed policies for other Regulated Activities and organisations including The Football Association,  Stoke Mandeville (Lampard Review), and the BBC (Dame Janet Smith Review). (more…)

Data is critically important for assessing a project’s direction of travel, effectiveness, achievements, scope for improvement and much else besides.

Mandate Now decided to look at the work of the The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia and compare data from it to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales.

Mandate Now provides no commentary to accompany the data.

The .pdf can be downloaded here

We hope you find this useful.

The consultation clock finally stopped when Government foot draggers released the pre-designed outcome to the consultation on 5/3/18.

Government retains a white knuckle grip on the failing status quo.

The Government acceded to a public consultation on Mandatory Reporting on 28.10.14. 

Children are being avoidably left in abusive settings as empirical research clearly reveals, because Government is out of step with the majority of countries on all four continents.

The article below by Julie Bindel preceded Andrew Norfolk’s reporting on organised child sexual exploitation of girls by men of Pakistani muslim origin in northern cities, by sometime (MN understand’s Andrew Norfolk’s first article was in 2012). Coinciding with the broadcast of  the three part drama Three Girls Ms Bindel explained some of the immense challenges she faced trying to place her article.  The same fate could have befallen Andrew Norfolk but for the sustained editorial support for Norfolk’s investigative reporting which had such a profound impact. By default, people find more reasons to walk away from child sexual abuse than stay. An abusee, well acquainted with the hopelessly inadequate statutory framework and the dynamics of abuse, can clear a roomful of politicians in SW1 faster than a Chubb fire alarm. The subject is considered a political swamp.

Note – clicking on any of the images below takes to you full article in an album on Google Photos which makes it far easier to read. 

Preventing and responding to Child Sexual Abuse: Learning about best practice from overseas (Lorraine Radford et al., 2017)

At the outset it is worth reminding ourselves of the reason the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse was established.

• To consider the extent to which State and non-State institutions have failed in their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation;
• To consider the extent to which those failings have since been addressed;
• To identify further action needed to address any failings identified;
• To consider the steps which it is necessary for State and non-State institutions to take in order to protect children from such abuse in future; and
• To publish a report with recommendations.

(more…)