What does it take to bury the truth? Apparently, not much — if you have the right connections, the right titles, and the patience to let survivors grow old waiting for justice.
This devastating presentation lays out, with forensic precision, the architecture of institutional failure that allowed child sexual abuse to flourish across Britain for decades. Beginning with raw NSPCC statistics — one reported child sex attack every 20 minutes in 2011, with fewer than one in ten cases ending in conviction — the evidence builds into something far more disturbing than negligence. This, the presenter argues, is not an accident. It is design.
From the care homes of North Wales in the 1970s to the corridors of Westminster in the 1980s, a consistent pattern emerges: investigations launched, then quietly shelved; reports written, then pulped or redacted beyond usefulness; witnesses prepared to testify, then never called; dossiers submitted, then lost. Over 2,000 files relating to child abuse evidence were destroyed between 1979 and 1999 alone. Eighty-one percent of case files on abused children — gone.
The Waterhouse Tribunal, established in 1996 to investigate abuse in North Wales children's homes, is examined in detail. Its terms of reference — carefully worded to exclude scrutiny of the Home Office, to prevent investigation of networks beyond two geographic areas, and to shield named individuals from prosecution — are shown to be not an oversight but a mechanism. A mechanism that allowed people like Peter Morrison, parliamentary private secretary to Margaret Thatcher, to escape accountability entirely.
The subsequent attempts to investigate Waterhouse itself — the Macur Review and Operation Pallial — are shown to be similarly compromised, their terms of reference again carefully curated, their conclusions conveniently incomplete.
By the time three consecutive chairs of the Independent Panel Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse resign in 2014 amid conflicts of interest, the central thesis is impossible to dismiss: this is not failure. This is policy.
Nothing has changed.