What Would You Have Done?

by Les May

RICHARD Farnell’s claim at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) that he knew nothing of the unsavoury goings on at Knowl View which came to light in late 1991 and early 1992, seems somewhat implausible.  But this wasn’t a civil or criminal trial so ‘implausible’ is the most definitive thing that can be said.

The demand by one of the solicitors at the inquiry that he resign is just theatre; a bit of playing to the gallery to make it look as if he has earned his fees and that the inquiry has achieved something worthwhile.  Even so I find it difficult to imagine that Farnell has much of a future in Rochdale’s political scene.  Like Danczuk before him he has become a liability to Rochdale Labour party.

No doubt some of the careerists who discover they have backed the wrong horse, not once, but twice, will miss him; his numerous enemies will gloat and the rest will remind themselves of Jim Dobbin’s comments in 2014 that Farnell was perhaps unwise to take on the job of Leader with questions about Knowl View still unanswered.

I agree with Jim Dobbin.   But I also think that whether Farnell ‘knew’ or not is irrelevant.  Focusing on this distracts from the substantive issue of whether RMBC acted reasonably and appropriately when the Shepherd and Mellor reports of 1991 and 1992 referred to the high levels of sexual activity amongst the boys at Knowl View, some of it coercive in nature.  Would Farnell ‘knowing’ have made any difference?

The stories about Knowl View had already had an airing in the Independent on Sunday in September 1995 which no-one seemed to notice, least of all the people doing the shouting now. When they re-surfaced in 2012, with Danczuk fanning the flames, in the minds of the public the term ‘sexual abuse’ did not have its present increasingly elastic definition. It conjured up the idea of being something that adults did to children or other vulnerable individuals.  I doubt that in the minds of most people it encompassed situations where it was ‘boy on boy’ or where youngsters actively solicited homosexual contact.

The evidence points to the fact that where the contemporary evidence pointed to an adult having had sexual contact with one of the boys the police pursued the matter and prosecuted the individual concerned. What is less clear, at least to me, is the question of what is/was the legal status of the ‘boy on boy’ sexual activity, which appears to be what was going on at Knowl View.

Had it been a mixed school I don’t think this sort of query would have arisen. I’m not anti-feminist point scoring here when I say the lad, but not the girl, would probably have have been prosecuted.

So I’m going to ask YOU what YOU would have done if you were a senior council officer and the report prepared by sexual health worker Phil Shepherd had plopped onto YOUR desk at the end of 1991 and YOU had read;

‘The present situation within the school is described by the staff as follows:
One boy who is homosexual has contact with an adult outside the school.

Several of the senior boys indulge in oral sex with one another.  

'Reputedly five of the junior boys have been or are involved in 'cottaging' in and around public toilets.  Men as far away as Sheffield are believed to be aware of this activity and travel to Rochdale to take part. 

'One eight-year-old is thought to have been involved.  The police are aware of the problem.  What action has been taken is not known. 

'One rent boy has been removed from the school.  The suggestion that he may return soon has angered the staff. 

'Some boys have been "forced" to have sex with others.

'This degree of sexual activity, if it is factual, points to fundamental problems within the school.’  (my emphasis, because the first action which was taken was to commission a psychologist to visit the school to ascertain whether the claims were true.)

So what would you have done? 
Would you have closed the school immediately even though it served three local authorities?
Would you have insisted on prosecuting the older boys who indulged in oral sex?
Would you have insisted that the boys involved in ‘forcing’ others be prosecuted?
Do you think the term "sexual abuse" is the best way of describing what was found?

The term I have repeatedly used about what was going on at Knowl View is ‘unsavoury’.  What people do in the privacy of their bedroom is not my business.  When these things happen in an institution like a school or a prison I find it distasteful.  They should not have happened at Knowl View.  They should not have been allowed to happen.   But they did.

The reason seems to be that in terms of priority special schools like this were at the back of the queue for resources, for visits from educational advisers and for adequate staffing.   As for the ‘naughty boys’ who were at Knowl View it may have been ‘out of sight, out of mind’, an attitude we perhaps all shared.   Also Rochdale MBC was busy reorganising its secondary education provision in the years immediately prior to 1990.   At the same time the Thatcher government was encouraging schools to ‘opt out’ of the Local Education Authority and some schools were holding ballots of parents.

The substantive question is, when confronted with a serious problem at Knowl View, which may well have been in part of their own making, did the officers concerned react appropriately or did they try to ‘cover it up’?   My view is that they acted appropriately and in a timely fashion.   If you disagree, I ask again, what would YOU have done?

I’m told there are people close to the local Labour parties who are talking about ‘a crisis of sexual abuse in Rochdale’.   If they are I can only ask, What crisis? If they talking it up as a means of bringing down Farnell there are two things to say. The first is that their efforts are redundant; Farnell has no longer any credibility and won’t want to face the electorate.  The second is that they are ‘piddling in the same pot’ as Simon Danczuk.  In 2014 Danczuk talked up the problems at Knowl View which looked like an effort to discredit Colin Lambert who has just delivered Labour an astonishing electoral result.  Is this really who they feel happy to be compared with?    Just look what happened to him.