Met officers dissuaded children from making sexual abuse claims, report finds

Metropolitan police officers tried to put off children from making complaints about alleged sexual abuse and privately blamed young people for crimes suffered, a damning official report has revealed.

Most investigations into child exploitation were rated as inadequate by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC). Of the 244 cases it examined, 43 were graded as good, more than half (121) as inadequate and 80 as needing improvement.

HMIC decided the situation was so dire that it told the Met to improve in three areas, helping to keep the force in special measures, and it said it would reinspect to check that promised improvements had happened.

The report found that in some cases children had been dissuaded from making criminal complaints, and that in the majority of cases examined, 100 out of 184, children who were victims of exploitation were not seen in person. “We also saw language recorded on some crime reports that indicated the sexual offences investigation-trained officers encouraged children not to pursue a complaint instead of offering support and reassurance,” the report said.