Child Abuse Inquiry Publishes Interim Report

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse recently published their first interim report, providing an overview of the Inquiry's work and highlighting emerging key themes.

The Inquiry has so far held five public hearings, a series of seminars and published two investigation reports.

The Inquiry Chair, Professor Alexis Jay, anticipates the Inquiry will have made substantial progress by 2020, with a further eight public hearings to be heard within the next 12 months.

The Interim Report lists 18 recommendations to be implemented by the Government, police and other institutions to better protect children from sexual abuse. Of these recommendations, two are of primary importance to insurers:

1. Public Liability Register

   The Association of British Insurers has been asked to consider whether a register of public liability insurers could be introduced to assist claimants in child sexual abuse cases in locating the insurers. This is expected to operate in much the same way as the Employers Liability Tracing Office.

2. Redress scheme

   The Government has been tasked with setting up a financial redress scheme for survivors of the Child Migrant Programme, where 130,000 British children were forcibly deported into domestic and labour servitude in Australia and other Commonwealth countries by the UK Government, and leading churches and charities from 1947 to the 1970s.

   This government-enforced trafficking was bigger in scale, geographical spread, and went undetected for longer than perhaps any other institutional abuse to date.

   The IICSA's recent report noted that the post war child migration was a "fundamentally flawed policy" and the Government "failed to ensure that there were in place sufficient measures to protect children from sexual abuse (as well as other forms of abuse and neglect)."

   The IICSA panel called on the Government to establish a redress scheme without delay, with payments to be made within the next 12 months to provide an equal award to every applicant, as it concluded all were exposed to the risk of sexual abuse. In Australia, victims from the school in Molong won a settlement from the state and federal governments of more than $20m in 2015, but this is the first step in the UK's compensatory response to the abuse.

   As this example highlights, whilst it is not part of the Inquiry's function to determine civil or criminal liability of named individuals or organisations, the Inquiry may still reach findings of fact relevant to its terms...