Police investigations into allegations of historical child sex abuse have been branded “inadequate” in a new report, which claims more than one-third of such inquiries are substandard.
Her Majesty’s
Inspectorate of Constabulary’s latest report found the police
response to 38 percent of child abuse inquiries in a sample of
nearly 600 was inadequate.
Of the 576 cases considered in the report, 177 were deemed of a
good standard, 179 regarded as merely adequate, while 220 were
viewed as inadequate.
In one of the cases, social workers blamed the cause of a
four-year-old girl’s vaginal bleeding on eczema, despite her
claiming she’d been abused by a family member.