Lawyers for nine men said to have been repeatedly sexually abused at school accused Justice Lowell Goddard of treating their clients with contempt and costing them money by “walking off” from the troubled child abuse inquiry.
The men who attended Stanhope Castle approved school in Co Durham travelled to the high court in London, days before the judge from New Zealand resigned, to offer evidence as to why they should take part in the independent inquiry into child sex abuse.
Even though the men – one of whom has been bed-bound for more than a decade – are vulnerable individuals who claim to have been “seriously and repeatedly sexually abused” as children, they were not offered any resolution on their application for “core participant” status before Goddard quit.
Their lawyer, David Enright of Howe & Co solicitors, has written to Keith Vaz, chair of the Commons home affairs select committee, to complain about the treatment of his clients by the judge, who was on an annual pay package of £500,000. Enright said: “My clients were shocked that, subsequently and just days after they had made their renewed application for core participant status to Justice Goddard, she resigned with immediate effect.
“At no time, in the interim, did she consider it appropriate to determine my clients’ applications, which had been made before her and after a number of my clients had travelled to London to be present in the high court.
“My clients rightly consider it entirely unacceptable for a senior judge to, seemingly, simply walk off the job (or be asked to leave her job) before determining their applications for core participant status.”
Keith Vaz called on Goddard to explain her resignation to his select committee, and questions the judge over her treatment of the men.
So does that make matters much better? No! Keith Vaz himself being the shamed minister involved in rent boy allegations, and therefore well qualified to put such questions, as an unabashed carpet sweeper himself.
The enquiry is unzipping and spilling its well paid staff by the wayside.
Lawyers who have resigned so far include:
Toby Fisher - joint first junior counsel to the inquiry (August 2015)
Elizabeth Prochaska - joint first junior counsel to the inquiry (September 2016)
Ben Emmerson QC - lead counsel on the inquiry (September 2016)
Aileen McColgan - lead barrister on inquiry investigations into the Anglican and Catholic churches (November 2016).
A survivors' group of 600 abuse victims has withdrawn from the independent inquiry into historic abuse, labelling it an "unpalatable circus".
The Shirley Oaks Survivors Association, which represents victims who lived in children's homes run by Lambeth Council, has lost confidence in the inquiry's leadership.
The Shirley Oaks Survivors Association, which has repeatedly threatened to withdraw in the past, is planning to publish the results of its own investigation.
It says the Home Office, which sponsors the inquiry and provided some of its staff, had a role in covering up abuse in the past.
19th November 2016. Alexis Jay declares in The Times: "There are some people who would like to see us fail because it suits their agenda to not want dark institutional forces brought into the light. But shine that light we will."
Hopefully hers will be the light at the end of this long tunnel.
Dark institutional forces will include those abusers guilty of hurting children and reveal the animal nature of these harmful traits. Human behaviour has its genetic roots alongside primeval behaviour that can surface in any one of us, yet too easily go unrecognised or denied, by peers that prefer not to see the damage done to children.
Within the Police forces even, there is a certain proportion who will take advantage of their position of trust. See this recent report by the BBC
here. .
Great Britain has the worst record of child abuse in all Europe. A core of abusers deep within the very institutions that has set up an enquiry into itself! A brand of tainted inquisitors that stands little chance of outing those guilty of abuse from within. Dark institutional forces indeed. An enquiry designed to fail. An enquiry with an impossible remit. A vacuum with no power to blow or suck out the truth without becoming hopelessly blocked by the sum of its failing parts.
