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‘Treat children as children’: rape-law change call

Britain’s Baroness Casey has recommended changing the law so that adults who have sex with children are charged with rape, in the light of her report on sexual exploitation of children.

The report, published yesterday, has prompted Britain's government to announce a national inquiry.

Under current British law, the age of consent is 16, and any sexual activity with a child below that age is a criminal offence.

But offenders who have the consent in fact (if not in law) of their victims are charged with sexual activity with a child under section 9 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, rather than rape.

Casey said that the intention was avoiding criminalising relationships between teens who were very close in age.

“However, in practice, this audit saw this nuance in law being used to the benefit of much older men who had groomed vulnerable children for sex,” she said.

Most heinous crime

The report describes group-based child sexual exploitation as one of the most heinous crimes in society.

Casey writes: “We are talking about multiple sexual assaults committed against children by multiple men on multiple occasions, beatings and gang rapes. Girls having to have abortions, contracting sexually transmitted infections, having children removed from them at birth”.

She said that the girls had faced long-term physical and mental health impacts and sometimes had criminal convictions for actions they took while under coercion.

Reprehensible

“What makes child sexual exploitation particularly reprehensible is that it consists of both formal and informal groups of men preying on girls, coercing, manipulating, and deceiving them in pursuit of sexual gratification and power,” the report continues.

The victims, as well as their youth, have additional vulnerabilities – they might be in care, have a physical or mental disability, or have already suffered neglect or abuse in earlier years.

Their predators see them as ideal victims, ready to be tricked, the Casey report adds.

“That is why I want the legislation on rape tightened up so that an adult having penetrative sex with a child under 16 is rape; no excuses, no defence,” Baroness Casey said.

The state had failed in its duty to the young girls involved, she said.

“The appalling lack of data on ethnicity in crime recording alone is a major failing over the last decade or more. Questions about ethnicity have been asked but dodged for years,” Casey said in her report.

Obfuscation

Instead of closer examination, there had been obfuscation, with incomplete and unreliable data used to suit the ends of those presenting it, she said.

The lack of clarity and transparency led to people feeling they had no choice but to call for statutory inquiries, she said.

“In too many cases, we have seen state and church institutions, residential care and medical settings, all pressured to hold inquiries into historic failings.

“We should expect more of our own public institutions than that they should have to be dragged kicking and screaming by the media, victims, and campaigners to carry out their own

reviews or inquiries into what happened,” Casey’s report said.

“If we’d got this right years ago – seeing these girls as children raped rather than ‘wayward teenagers’ or collaborators in their abuse, collecting ethnicity data, and acknowledging as a system that we did not do a good enough job – then I doubt we’d be in this place now,” the report continues.

“We need to see children as children,” Casey adds.

Let them down

“We let them down when we treat or see them as adults, especially in relation to safeguarding issues and the treatment of children in the criminal-justice system.

“We must tighten up the law to reduce uncertainty, which adults can exploit to avoid or reduce the punishments that should be imposed for their crimes.”