The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has launched a consultation on how the public believes the victims of child sexual abuse should be perceived after “unprecedented coverage” of such cases over recent months.
The head of the CPS, Keir Starmer, has said that the Service must improve its approach to child sexual abuse cases more widely, which means that it needs to receive wide-ranging contributions to the process of reform.
The recently published guidelines from the CPS that set out the complexities of such cases have been designed to outline the approach that prosecutors should take when dealing with child sexual abuse cases.
They are intended to be inclusive and should be applied to cases where a sexual offence has been committed against a child or young person, unless there are good reasons why not in a particular case, and these reasons should be noted clearly by the prosecutor.
Mr Starmer also made it clear that the guidelines are designed so that prosecutors focus on the overall allegation, rather than the perceived weakness of the person making it, making reference to a recent case where a prosecutor described a 13-year-old child as a “sexual predator”.
Speaking of other past cases, Mr Starmer said that an over-cautious approach has been adopted on some occasions, perhaps reflecting an understandable concern for guarding against false allegations, but added that his view is that this degree of caution is not generally justified.
The concern should not be ignored, he said, but it is important that it is kept in proper perspective. The risk, otherwise, is of sexual offences being subjected to a different and, in reality, more rigorous test than that applied to victims of other crimes.
He added that the guidelines also need to stand the test of time, which is why he is putting the new approach out to public consultation and is urging the pubic to have their say before the consultation ends on 3 September.