Over this Labour Government’s term in office so far, we have spent a lot of time discussing and highlighting the evils of child abuse and the exploitation of women and girls, and there has been a lot of progress. The audit from Baroness Casey on grooming gangs made several recommendations that we have already put into motion; the reforms that we are making to taxi licensing and safety through the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill are a key example.
However, I want to open today’s debate by talking about an issue that I have previously discussed with the Minister: the mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, which is one of the key recommendations from the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. I approach this issue as someone who grew up in a small religious organisation, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which IICSA recognised as having a serious problem with child sexual abuse. Last June, I stood here and highlighted my concerns that the Government’s proposals to introduce mandatory reporting in the Crime and Policing Bill have been significantly watered down from IICSA’s recommendations. I raised three issues: first, a lack of proper sanctions for non-compliance; secondly, the fact that the duty proposed applies only when someone receives a direct disclosure or witnesses abuse happening, and not when they have strong reasons to suspect it; and thirdly, loopholes in who is included; in particular, the drafting required religious leaders who have “unsupervised” contact with children to come under the duty to report. I set out why that would allow most lay religious leaders to escape the duty, despite their holding enormous power and influence over their followers, using the particular example of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
To begin with, I do have some good news. Just a few hours ago, the House of Lords approved a Government amendment to remove the word “unsupervised” from that definition of religious leaders. I want to thank the Minister, as well as her Lords counterpart, Lord Hanson, for listening to my lobbying on that front. That small change could make a real difference in protecting children from abuse in small religious organisations, but it will make the most difference only if we fix the other two issues, on which there has not been as much progress. I will not rehash my arguments in detail about why they are so critical.
First, I commend the hon. Gentleman on bringing forward this debate. He spoke on this issue some time ago, and made a very good case. I support him in the case that he is putting forward, and I want to give him an illustration. A 2013 report by the Northern Ireland Assembly revealed that small, unaffiliated groups, including those that use church or faith premises, had gaps in child protection and safeguarding, and might not be subject to credential checks. Does he agree with me—I believe he does—that legislation and guidance must be brought up to date and strengthened to ensure that smaller organisations do not fall through the gaps when it comes to ensuring proper safeguarding, so that we can increase protections for all children across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? He deserves to be congratulated on what he is doing tonight.
I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that point. It sounds like really helpful evidence and a really good example, and I will certainly go away and have a look at it.
I will not rehash the arguments I made in June, but I will say that IICSA was clear, having examined the issue in huge depth over many years, that both strong sanctions and the inclusion of reasonable suspicion were essential to create a duty that works, and its views have not changed. On Friday, two of the four IICSA panel members, Sir Malcolm Evans and Ivor Frank, wrote to the Home Secretary, pressing for the duty in the Crime and Policing Bill to be strengthened, so that it complies with their original recommendations.
I believe that Alexis Jay told the Home Affairs Committee that this mandatory reporting was one of the most important recommendations. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is really important that we deliver on the recommendation in full, and do not allow any leeway when there is reasonable evidence that abuse may be occurring, which would allow people to get away with not reporting that suspicion?
I am really grateful for that contribution from my hon. Friend, and I absolutely agree with her. It is really important that we listen to IICSA, which spent many years on this, and deliver what it recommended. When it comes to religious organisations in which there is a strong culture of distrusting secular authorities, there is no other way to make them do the right thing. I again highlight the work of the Australian royal commission, which found that the Jehovah’s Witnesses in that country had documented 1,006 cases of child sexual abuse and reported not even one to the police—not one. That is not an accident; it is a systemic cover-up on a catastrophic level.
The Government’s case for not fully complying with IICSA seems to rest on two arguments: first, that strong sanctions for a failure to report child sexual abuse would create a chilling effect, which would stop people wanting to go into professions that work with children; and, secondly, that widening the duty to include reasonable suspicion would produce a flood of reports that would overwhelm our system. The Government have written to me to say that their position on these issues is supported by expert stakeholders, including the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Lucy Faithfull Foundation and the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse.
I think it takes an average of 26 years for children to disclose that they were victims of sexual abuse, so it is absolutely critical that the provision on the reasonable suspicion of abuse is included in the Bill, as well as the trigger for the duty to report. In small, high-demand religious organisations, cultural norms prevent open discussion of sexual harm and discourage mandatory reporting. That needs to be overturned.
I am very grateful to the hon. Lady, who I know has done a lot of work on this matter, in particular on making sure that the seal of confession is not exempted from mandatory reporting. I very much appreciate her work on that, which is really important. She says—I am sure that she has the correct figure—that it takes on average 26 years for someone, having been a victim, to report child sexual abuse. That goes to show that we cannot have a duty that relies on that reporting. We must ensure that people are empowered and will report their reasonable suspicion.
I met all the stakeholders I have just cited and many more, and not all back the Government position. The NSPCC is deeply concerned that the professional sanctions proposed by the Government as the only consequence for non-compliance are not enough. It does not want sanctions that could lead to a criminal record, but very much wants stronger civil sanctions, including potential fines, so I would argue that there is ample space for a well-thought-through compromise here. I have drafted an exemplar amendment, showing how civil sanctions could work. It is based on the Home Office fine-issuing powers in the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, and Baroness Grey-Thompson tabled the amendment in the Lords, for debate earlier today.
Similarly, the NSPCC feels strongly that the mandatory reporting duty should include reasonable suspicion as a trigger. That raises concerns about why the Home Office said to me that the NSPCC did not hold that position, and used that point to bolster the Government position. Some other stakeholders cited as agreeing with the Government have also expressed a much more nuanced position to me, accepting that the position is finely balanced, and that their concerns could be ameliorated through effective training—there have been amendments on that previously.
On these issues, the international evidence is so clear. Many countries with mandatory reporting have criminal sanctions, including a significant majority of US states, France, Australia, Croatia and Canada.
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. On reasonable suspicion, does he agree with me that in any closed community, including religious organisations, it is a characteristic of abuse that people have suspicions, but often nobody feels able to speak up? Bringing reasonable suspicion into the definition for mandatory reporting, and putting that on the statute book, is a really important safeguard in that context. It creates an additional duty that could allow us to deal with circumstances that are pretty common.
I agree completely with my hon. Friend. In the debate in the House of Lords earlier today, Baroness Grey-Thompson gave a good example from when she was a younger athlete of sports coaches’ behaviour that she had observed. She believes that if there had been a duty relating to reasonable suspicion, it could have helped in dealing with some of that.
In none of the countries I named earlier has the feared chilling effect arisen, despite strong sanctions for failure to report. Nevertheless, as I have set out, firm civil sanctions would be a fair compromise, supported by virtually all stakeholders. On the concerns about floods of reports, we just have to look at the international evidence. Those floods just do not happen. Extensive research by Professor Ben Mathews in Western Australia, which has both criminal sanctions and the inclusion of reasonable suspicion, found that while there was an increase, the number of substantiated investigations—those with a finding of abuse—doubled, from an annual mean of 160 in the pre-law period to 327 in the post-law period. That indicates that twice as many sexually abused children were being identified. Compare that to Wales, where IICSA was told that the introduction of a weaker duty in 2016 had
“not led to a substantive change in practice”.
At this point, I want to highlight that the NSPCC, the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation all clearly want the Government to criminalise the intentional concealment of abuse. Clause 79 of the Bill criminalises stopping a mandated reporter from carrying out their duty to report. That is welcome, but it needs to be broader. In the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other small religious groups, there is ample evidence that religious leaders regularly stop victims or their parents reporting abuse to police because it will “bring reproach on God’s name”. As parents and victims will not be mandated reporters, that will remain completely legal. Once again, I urge the Government to close these loopholes.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Sam Carling) for his speech, and I am grateful to other Members for their important contributions today. I welcome the opportunity to talk about the Government’s commitment to safeguarding and protecting children and adults from harm across all settings, including within religious and faith communities. I want to give a special mention to my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire for securing this debate and for the compassion, thoroughness and persistence that he has shown this House on this issue.
Let me first be clear that this Government recognise the central role of faith in our national life, and we are committed to building a Britain where all communities feel safe and where the contributions of people of faith and belief are warmly welcomed and richly valued, as are the contributions of those who, like myself, have no faith—well, I have a lot of faith, but none that would be recognised or organised.
The insights of faith and belief groups should and do play an important role in the national conversation around safeguarding children and preventing violence against women and girls. The other central point to make at the outset is that the Government utterly condemn all acts of psychological, emotional, physical and sexual abuse against children and adults in all settings, including religious settings of any size or denomination. All such acts should be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice. As with every case of abuse, my thoughts are first and foremost with the victims and survivors.
As this House knows, we are taking forward an ambitious range of measures to improve safeguarding and child protection. Through the violence against women and girls strategy published last year, which deploys the full power of the state to achieve this aim, and through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, we are strengthening multi-agency safeguarding arrangements and improving information sharing. We are also taking forward work to safeguard and protect children from harm in out-of-school settings, including religious organisations offering education in their own faith.
My constituent is a survivor of abuse within a religious organisation, and she represents a larger group of survivors at the same organisation. She has found the Charity Commission to be utterly ineffectual and far too slow in dealing with her complaint. When I wrote to the Minister about this issue, she referred me to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. When I wrote to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, I was referred back to the Home Office. The religious organisation continues to operate with the suspicion that the practices that led to the abuse claimed by my constituent are continuing. We are a couple of years down the line in raising these concerns, so will the Minister advise me how I can get some traction on behalf of my constituent to ensure that her allegations and those of other survivors of the organisation are properly dealt with, and that the organisation cannot continue to operate with the same practices?
I am more than happy to look directly into that case. My hon. Friend highlights an important problem: we need clarity about who is responsible in the system. First and foremost, if child abuse in an institution is raised with anyone, it should be reported to the police, with the support of the victim. I do not know the details of that case, but I will come on to the issues that my hon. Friend raised about the Charity Commission. As a constituency MP, I have had to raise such issues with the Charity Commission. We need to ensure that the regime of regulation in our charitable sector is as robust as it can be on safeguarding, as well as on financial irregularity and other things. I do not disagree with what my hon. Friend said.
If I may, I would like to explore what happens with the Minister. There is mistrust of external agencies, and in a lot of these small, high-demand religious organisations—those that look like cults—people may not realise that they have any capacity or agency to report.
With the mandatory reporting duty, a huge body of work will go into guidance about how to report. However small—however nervous—they are covered by the duty.
I have only three minutes still to speak. To the issue of faith-based charities promoting misogyny, I hear the concerns raised by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire. The Charity Commission has apparently reviewed the National Secular Society report on religious charities promoting misogyny and confirmed that it has already assessed and responded to a number of incidents. I will follow up on that action, and I will gladly meet him once I have a fully robust answer. He invites me to annoy, I suppose, the Treasury—I do not think he used those words—but I agree with him that, as in the examples he gave, the idea that an organisation can promote the hatred of women or the supplication of people’s wives and also be considered a charity is an alien one. I will follow up on that.
Furthermore, as the Prime Minister announced recently, the Government are already working with the commission on plans to give it additional powers to help tackle extremist abuse, which will bar anyone convicted of hate crimes from serving as a trustee and make it easier for the commission to act against anyone undertaking that. The changes will be made after a public consultation that is coming this month, which I invite everybody to take part in.
I will speak to the Department of Health and Social Care on medical coercion. I do not lead on that as a Minister, but I do not disagree with my hon. Friend that people must be able to make those decisions in full view.
I thank my hon. Friends for their contributions. I promise that we will continue to try to work together, because we all want the same thing.
Question put and agreed to.
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The Government’s own impact assessment indicates that the duty will increase the number of child sexual offences recorded by police by just 0.3%. Vulnerable children need us to create a much stronger duty to report this abuse, as IICSA recommended. By doing so, we can shine much-needed light on safeguarding failings in small religious groups and others, and protect so many children.
I will now move on to discuss other safeguarding issues in small religious groups, beginning with shunning. In the Jehovah’s Witnesses, this has long been called “disfellowshipping”. When someone commits a serious sin in the eyes of the religion, their believing family and friends are ordered to shut them off entirely and treat them as though they are dead.
The same applies when someone voluntarily leaves. The Australian royal commission looked at this too, through the lens of the position in which it places victims of abuse, saying:
“The Jehovah’s Witness organisation’s practice of shunning members who disassociate from the organisation has the very real potential of putting a survivor in the untenable position of having to choose between constant re-traumatisation at having to share a community with their abuser and losing that entire community altogether.”
It happens all the time. The culture of non-reporting and forgiveness for child abusers leads to them remaining at large. Victims are silenced, told that their abusers have been forgiven by God; many leave, and then it is they who lose their entire families. It is victim blaming taken to extremes.
Let us consider those removed involuntarily for apparent “grave sins”. What might constitute a grave sin? Well, how about being gay? Religious teachings regularly equate homosexuality with paedophilia—they are lumped together. Let me read a brief quote from the Jehovah’s Witness “Awake!” magazine, a key publication intended to teach believers:
“True, some individuals may very well be prone to homosexuality… but…a Christian cannot excuse immoral behaviour by saying he was ‘born that way.’ Child molesters invoke the same pathetic excuse when they say their craving for children is ‘innate’. But can anyone deny that their sexual appetite is perverted? So is the desire for someone of the same sex.”
Children growing up in that religion are subjected to this bile constantly. I would know—I was one of them. But at least I survived. Lots do not; people like Stephen, the nephew of one of the religion’s governing body members, who died by suicide in January 2020, having been disfellowshipped and ostracised for being gay. Yet the organisation is considered a charity in the UK. It holds tax exemptions and is eligible for direct UK Government funding through Gift Aid. How can that be right? How can an organisation that causes so much harm be charitable?
It is not the only example. There are many small religious organisations active in the UK that expose children to horrific teachings, particularly about women and girls. At Prime Minister’s questions recently, I highlighted the National Secular Society’s “Mission and Misogyny” report, which is full of such examples. There was a recent example near the Minister’s constituency; in January, the NSS reported that the Green Lane masjid and community centre in Birmingham streamed a sermon in which listeners were told that
“discipline in the case of rebellion”
is one of the
“rights of the husband over the wife”,
that husbands have a right to “obedience” as well as a right to “intimacy”.
I must be clear at this point, as I hope I have been throughout, that these extremist examples happen across faith traditions. This example is Islamic; I have equally spent a lot of time up to now talking about a Christian example. These organisations must not cloud our view of the many religious charities that do brilliant work to support people, but they point to a broken charity system in need of repair.
That is why I have been calling for a review into charity law and regulation. We must have ways to ensure that organisations that promote harm towards vulnerable people, particularly through mandated shunning, cannot gain the tax, reputational and funding benefits of a charity. The Charity Commission must also seriously step up its game as a regulator, as there is a serious pattern of failing to take action despite repeated requests, which the “Mission and Misogyny” report lays bare.
I want to also put on the record my shock at the recent case in which the Charity Commission took legal action against the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman to stop the ombudsman laying before this House reports detailing complaints upheld against the commission. The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, on which I sit, had to bring a privilege motion to force the ombudsman to release the files—which it wanted to do—because of the commission’s legal threats blocking it. I understand that the commission has still pursued that legal action. It is not on.
I ask the Minister whether she will make herself popular with the Treasury by agreeing that organisations promoting hate and abusive practices such as shunning should not be eligible for public money, and therefore support my calls for a thorough review of charity status. Will she also agree that either the Government or the relevant Select Committee should consider a thorough deep dive into the Charity Commission’s approach to safeguarding issues?
Finally, I want to briefly touch on a third issue: safeguarding and coercion in medical settings. Again, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are the clearest example. As many people will know, their religion teaches not to accept blood transfusions, which is described as a “personal choice” that they make. But when the consequence for not taking that choice is shunning and the permanent cutting off of family and friends, is it a choice? Maybe—and religious freedoms of adults to make medical decisions must always be allowed. Similarly, people must always be free to request visits from religious ministers during medical treatment or a hospital stay.
In the Jehovah’s Witnesses, though, requests for religious ministers will be met with the arrival of a hospital liaison committee. This is a group of elders whose role is simple: to enforce the rules on blood transfusions. They will “help” patients by advocating for their “personal choice” not to accept blood and will always claim that decisions are for the patient to make. However, the elders’ handbook, which I have here, clearly states that Witnesses should be strongly encouraged to fill out durable powers of attorney for someone else to refuse blood on their behalf. Either way, the hospital liaison committee will be there, watching. If the patient does not comply with the no-blood rule, they can expect to be disfellowshipped and shunned promptly. With the HLC there, there is little hope of being able to make a real “personal choice” in private if it differs from religious teaching. That really is coercion.
Ministers of religion can no doubt provide huge support and relief to patients of all faiths, and they do so, but I would argue that they should not be allowed to advocate for patients’ medical wishes where there is a clear conflict of interest, as in these cases. Furthermore, these bodies must only be allowed in when the patient requests them. A former HLC elder has approached me with allegations that some NHS trusts have established policies to call the HLC by default when a Jehovah’s Witness is admitted. No doubt it is done with the best of intentions, as they do not want to do anything wrong, but given that those HLCs exist to push an agenda that may not be the patient’s, that is a serious problem.
I will close by asking the Minister if she will liaise with Department of Health and Social Care colleagues and push for a review of NHS trust policies towards these bodies to ensure that they are called only when a patient requests it, and that patients have clear opportunities to articulate their final decision in respect of any treatment and receive treatment away from the HLC if they so wish.
All out-of-school settings have a legal duty to safeguard and protect children from harm in their care. To support them in meeting this duty, the Department for Education has published guidance setting out the safeguarding standard that they should meet and last year launched a call for evidence to gather views on potential approaches to strengthening safeguarding further, including regulation. The Department for Education is currently analysing the responses and continuing engagement with key stakeholders, and will respond in due course.
We are also taking action on the recommendations of IICSA, which have been mentioned, including establishing a child protection authority to improve the national oversight and leadership of child protection and introducing through the Crime and Policing Bill a mandatory duty to report child sexual abuse. The duty will create a culture of knowledge, confidence and openness among those most likely to be alerted to child sexual abuse. It will help children and young people to trust that their voices will be heard when they speak out. The duty will apply to those working or volunteering with children in faith settings. There will be no exceptions based on religious practices. We will continue to engage with groups that may be impacted to help them manage the implementation of this new duty.
My hon. Friend raised some specific points about the Government’s mandatory reporting duty, which I would like to address. We are grateful for the expertise of the child protection sector in shaping the new duty. Our shared aim is to have a regime that is effective for children and workable for professionals.
For the avoidance of doubt, the organisations that my hon. Friend mentioned have always fully supported the Government policy of not applying criminal sanctions to the failure to report. It is true that they also advocate for robust action against the deliberate concealment of abuse, but there is a qualitative difference between a lapse in reporting and taking active steps to deter it, or destroying or concealing evidence. The Crime and Policing Bill reflects that distinction by creating a criminal offence of obstructing a reporter from carrying out their duty, punishable by up to seven years in prison. The question of whether failures to report should be subject to sanctions was fully considered during the Bill’s parliamentary passage. Earlier today, on Report in the other place, the House rejected a proposition to amend the Bill to that effect.
The question of what triggers the duty—for example, whether to include the observation of signs and indicators —is a separate matter, although I recognise that, because these issues are often debated in tandem, some conflation may have crept in. The Government have not claimed the same stakeholder endorsement for our chosen threshold for the duty. Although some stakeholders favour adding recognised indicators or reasonable suspicion that abuse has occurred, as I have set out previously the Government’s view is that we need to deliver a model that is clear, proportionate and operable, anchored in direct disclosure, witnessing or recorded material. As with all aspects of the duty, we will keep that under review, but we are confident that the Bill as drafted strikes the right balance.
Let me respond to some of the points that have been raised. I often feel anxious that people think that any organisation that they raise will not be considered as part of the duty, but most people in positions of trust—we do not need to name them—are covered by the duty because they work in regulated activity with children. That is the core definition in the Bill for a mandated reporter. In other words, if a person’s role as a sports coach already brings them into regular close contact with children, they are in scope.