My Lords, I am going to find myself in the difficult position of disagreeing absolutely with the two noble Baronesses. I am surprised that they have not had the context, because much of what I hear sounds like the work that we did two years ago, when I chaired the Trust for London committee that looked at child safety issues in relation to witchcraft and children accused of being possessed by evil spirits. I spent two years working with AFRUCA, the Somali community, the Victoria Climbié Foundation and others looking at the issue. During that time, we managed to disentangle what was at first thought to be an issue of belief but what, as became clear and as the two noble Baronesses made quite clear, was not about belief but about child protection.
In all the examples I have ever heard, if proper attention had been given to present child protection legal enactments, all those children should have been properly protected by the existing legislation. I agree with the noble Baronesses that if that is not so, we will need something additional—but, as has been said, all the organisations that took part in the round table, except for AFRUCA, did not see the need for a change in legislation. What they saw a need for was the education of social workers who simply do not understand the issue, and for more work to be done with these communities.
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The Trust for London funded all these communities to do work. We undertook a piece of research that looked at how many cases there were, and we could not find many cases. The cases we found were truly horrific; I have met the families and children. I agree absolutely with the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton: it goes to your heart and you want to do everything you can to protect these children. But the real difficulty when it comes to legislation is trying to separate the belief issues from the witchcraft, neglect and abuse that occur in some of these cases.
Protection in Africa is not what has been suggested. The Nigerian legislation has had very little effect. If you talk to any group working out there at the moment, you will hear that children in Nigeria undergo horrific experiences connected to witchcraft of a quite different level from what we have in this country because there are no basic child protection structures in those countries into which the organisations can move and help children get protection.
I am ambivalent. I do not necessarily object to this—I have not really thought it through, I have to say—but I wonder whether having it on the statute book might in fact make it more difficult sometimes because of the belief issue. You have to remember that there are some quite difficult Christian communities—the Plymouth Brethren have just been mentioned—who have very strict beliefs, some of which I would certainly not agree with. However, whether those are outside the law and whether this would catch some of those communities I do not know; I would have to look at it more carefully.
I advise everyone to look at the Trust for London report because it is the most recent piece of work, it was externally evaluated and the cases were externally collected. All the organisations together came to the conclusion that with proper implementation at a local authority level of understanding—which is what we say every time we come to these issues: it is about training, application and action—the present law would catch the worst cases that we hear about. In the examples we heard today, certainly there should have been intervention by the local authority to protect the child.