13 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleFiona Trott,North of England correspondentandRuth Green
Getty ImagesChildren who were groomed, sexually abused and then prosecuted for crimes, including prostitution, are still being failed, the author of a landmark report has said.
Baroness Louise Casey, who led the national investigation into grooming gangs, called on the government last year to quash any convictions of victims who were criminalised when they should have been protected.
The government has since introduced legislation to pardon “child prostitution” offences.
However, in an exclusive interview with the BBC, Baroness Casey said that was the “lazy option” and did not go far enough, adding there should be a comprehensive scheme to look at quashing all wrongful convictions for victims.
“I feel that they’ve gone for the easy option and, if I’m being more brutal, [the] lazy option of not setting up a disregard scheme with enough thought, enough care and enough action,” Baroness Casey told the BBC.
So far, she said, “they have failed”.
The Home Office said it would take forward Baroness Casey’s recommendation to review criminal convictions that may have been shaped by a person’s experience of being sexually abused as a child.
A spokesperson said: “We encourage all those affected by these convictions to get in touch with the Criminal Cases Review Commission.”
The BBC has spoken to women who, decades on from being abused, said they were still being punished for crimes they were coerced into.
Joanne, not her real name, is one of thousands of people who were groomed and sexually abused as children, but were criminalised from the 1990s to 2010s rather than protected.
She was groomed from the age of 15 and said she was raped and sexually exploited over several years by more than 500 men, all over the country.
Joanne was repeatedly arrested as a child and, despite being under 18, she was treated as an offender and brought before the courts.
She was 17 when she received her first conviction in Wolverhampton for loitering and soliciting in the early 1990s.
In court, she was told she was a prostitute. “I didn’t have the mental or the emotional maturity to understand what that meant,” she told the BBC. But now – in her 50s – she recognises she was being raped.
“Everybody told me that I was this problem – that I was guilty and I had committed a crime,” she said.
Her criminal record of more than 40 prostitution convictions has prevented her from applying for jobs, going to college, travelling abroad and even volunteering at her children’s school.
Joanne and thousands of people like her are due to be pardoned for loitering or soliciting, following the new legislation. However, she said the law change does not go far enough.
She has soliciting convictions from when she was aged 18 and was still being trafficked. However, the change in the law does not recognise adult convictions, so those will remain.
Joanne also wants financial compensation for the huge impact a criminal record has had on her life.
Baroness Casey’s national audit into group based child sexual exploitation was published last June and the government accepted all 12 of her recommendations.
A full statutory national inquiry and policing operation are also under way, which will include targeted local investigations.
Baroness Casey said, one year on, the government had made “huge progress in many areas” but on the issue of quashing the convictions of child sexual exploitation victims, “they haven’t gone far enough, quickly enough”.
She said she wanted to hold the government to account.
“Just doing an expunging of child prostitution offences is not good enough, it’s not quick enough, it’s not clever enough and the system can do an awful lot better, an awful lot more quickly.”
Under the new laws, thousands of victims of grooming and child sexual exploitation will not have their convictions removed, as the new legislation only disregards “child prostitution” offences.
They include Fiona Goddard, who was targeted by a grooming gang as a teenager when she was living in a children’s home.
Nine men were convicted in 2019 for raping and trafficking her in Bradford.
Fiona said she was arrested so many times between the age of 13 and 18 – when she escaped her abusers – that she does not know how many convictions she has got.
“I think it’s between 30 and 50,” she said. “Many of them were for public order offences or I’d go back to the care home after being raped and beaten and I’d be emotionally dysregulated.
“The care homes weren’t allowed to offer you comfort or hugs or anything like that. You would get restrained and I’d end up fighting back against the restraints and then I’d get arrested for common assault or criminal damage.”
Fiona described repeatedly breaching her court orders because her perpetrators would “chop my electronic tag off and throw it in a bush”. She also said she missed court dates because she would often be “in some rape house, locked away in the bedroom”.
Fiona said the government’s decision to only remove convictions for child prostitution offences feels “like they’re trying to wipe away the evidence of their mistakes and their incorrect labelling rather than actually trying to fix an issue”.
She wants all survivors to have their cases reviewed individually.
Jamie Leigh Jones was abused from the age of 12 by a grooming gang in Oldham. She said she got her first conviction for public order offences when she was 13.
“I think I was arrested over 100 times when I was a kid,” she said. “When you’re a child, and you’re filled with alcohol and drugs, and these awful things are happening to you, and no-one’s listening to you, it’s like a call for help.”
Instead, she said magistrates in Oldham made the decision to name and shame her following a conviction for an anti-social behaviour order following an incident at the town’s main bus station.
“My face was plastered all over the newspapers. It made me an even bigger target than I already was. I just felt like the world was against me and I was on my own I didn’t have anyone,” she said.
When Jamie was 14 she was sentenced by a judge to four months in the Red Bank Secure Unit, a now‑closed juvenile detention centre in Merseyside, which housed some of Britain’s most serious young offenders, including Jon Venables, the killer of toddler James Bulger.
She described being “locked up” as horrendous and said all victims of grooming deserved to have their cases assessed individually and criminal records wiped clean.
The government said grooming victims with convictions that were not related to prostitution could apply to the independent Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which it said had the power to refer relevant convictions to courts “if there is a real possibility of a successful appeal”.
“We have already changed the law to introduce a disregard scheme for those who were cautioned or convicted of on-street prostitution offences as children. The first case for convictions outside of the scheme has now been referred to the courts to be reviewed, and we are backing victims with a historic investment of £100 million to tackle child sexual abuse.”
Joanne said she applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to have her prostitution convictions reviewed but was rejected.
Despite accepting that her convictions were linked to trafficking and coercion, and that she would be treated as a victim under current laws, the CCRC said the convictions were lawful at the time.
Joanne said she was now exhausted after battling against a system she believes continues to punish her.
“They’re just brushing it all under the carpet,” she said. “They need to compensate us. They need to validate the harm, the systemic harm that it caused us for the rest of our lives.”
The new law only applies to England and Wales. The Scottish Government says it has an ongoing strategy to tackle commercial sexual exploitation, which includes improving support for victims of recent and historic abuse.
In Northern Ireland, the Department of Justice is working on a review of the pardons and disregards scheme, with a view to bringing new proposals to the Executive in the next Assembly mandate.
Child groomingSexual violenceChild abuse