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The inquiry heard that hundreds of children were subjected to prolonged sexual, physical, and racial abuse and that paedophiles targeted the Shirley Oaks Children’s home campus in Croydon, London which could house up to 350 children until its closure in 1983.
Victims were "drugged, tortured and sexually assaulted" by "very many paedophiles", the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was told.
Council staff “put vulnerable children in the path” of sex offenders, who infiltrated children’s homes and foster care, with “devastating, life-long consequences for their victims”, this damning report into decades of abuse has found.
Employees in the south London borough of Lambeth “treated children in care as if they were worthless” and appeared to demonstrate “a callous disregard for the vulnerable children they were paid to look after”, according to the findings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). It heard evidence of children being raped, indecently assaulted, and sexually abused, but said that of complaints from 705 former residents across three such facilities, only one member of senior staff was ever disciplined.
When children reported complaints at the time, they were routinely disbelieved. The report estimated the number of those abused was likely much higher and recommended the Metropolitan Police should consider whether there were grounds for a criminal investigation into one boy who died in a care home in 1977, having previously complained of being abused by a senior member of staff.