Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse makes damning findings of decades-long failures to protect children in the care of Lambeth Council

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has made damning findings of decades-long failures to protect children in the care of Lambeth Council. The Inquiry criticises both the management and supervision by the local authority but also serious failures in police investigations. In one paragraph, the Inquiry said,

"The reality is that some Lambeth Council staff and councillors were complicit in putting children in care at risk of sexual abuse because they simply did not care enough. With some exceptions, they treated children in care as if they were worthless. As a consequence, individuals who posed a risk to children were able to infiltrate children's homes and foster care, with devastating, lifelong consequences for their victims."

This included, as the Inquiry finds,  misleading the coroner and other authorities about the circumstances in which a child who had complained of sexual abuse, had died. 

The report includes summaries of evidence from survivors of sexual abuse, including from LA-A131. He is a former resident at South Vale Children's Home, which the inquiry says was " an oppressive place for children to live, more like a place of punishment than a home", as a "brutal place, where violence and sexual assault were allowed to flourish".