Independent TD Carol Nolan has slammed the failure of the Department of Children or Tusla to contact the Department of Justice some 5 months after a scoping report from UCD identified the rape and sexual exploitation of children in care, and flagged the possibility of grooming gangs.
Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, confirmed to Deputy Nolan that her Department has had no contact from either Tusla or the Department of Children on the report, which the Independent TD described as profoundly alarming.
Deputy Nolan had submitted a parliamentary question to Minister Roderic O’Gorman in late June, asking if he or his Department had engaged with Tusla to discuss the issues highlighted in the scoping report involving what she described as the alarming levels of exploitation being experienced by children in the agency’s care.
Minister O’Gorman in his reply stated that since the report was published, his Department had been working closely with Tusla senior management on the matters raised in the report and that his Department would prioritise a review of the findings of this scoping report and its recommendations urgently.
The Minister also stated that his Department Officials will work with the Department of Justice to review the findings and recommendations of this report.
However, in a parliamentary reply provided to Deputy Nolan in the last number of days, Minister McEntee confirmed that while her Department is happy to engage with Tusla and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth on this matter, “to date, we have not been contacted about this study.”:
“I am not just deeply disappointed by the lack of inter-departmental engagement on this matter, I am profoundly alarmed,” said Deputy Nolan.
“It is almost incomprehensible that five months have now passed and there has been no communication between these two key Departments on an issue that has had, and is likely continuing to have, the most distressing outcomes for young and vulnerable girls and young adults.”
“Where is the priority? Where is the action? We need answers and we need movement on this issue immediately,” she asked Deputy Nolan.
As previously reported on Gript, the scoping report revealed that:
Vulnerable children in care in Ireland are clearly being targeted for sexual exploitation and abuse by “gangs of predatory men,” a stark new report from UCD has revealed.
It reported numerous cases where girls in the care of TUSLA, the State’s child and family agency, were “being coerced or enticed to provide sex acts to multiple men in exchange for a variety of goods” including clothes and jewellery.
Predatory gangs of men would identify residents where girls in care are being accommodated — and would wait around accommodation centres, even going so far as to wait in hotel lobbies where under-age girls were staying.
In one shocking revelation, the study revealed that men were “hanging around hotel lobbies” in order to sexually exploit children that were being accommodated there as a temporary State care solution.
The report expressed fears that sexual exploitation of children is going “under the radar” in Ireland, while drawing parallels with child sex abuse that went on in Rotherham and Rochdale in the UK – which was characterised by a failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse that took place from the 1980s until the late 2010s.
The report, entitled, ‘Protecting Against Predators’ makes several references to the deeply disturbing abuse of girls by organised gangs in Rotherham and Rochdale in Britain, saying it was difficult not to draw “parallels” with what happened in the UK cities.
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