Sexual abuse incidents in children hospital units

In this week’s episode of HJ Talks About Abuse, the team discuss the disturbing amount of sexual abuse incidents in various children hospital units. Over a thousand incidents have been recorded over 4 years, according to NHS statistics.

In 2020, the Care Quality Commission warned that “sexual incidents are commonplace on mental health wards”.

A single children’s mental health hospital, Taplow Manor Hospital in Huntercombe’s Maidenhead with just 59 beds reported more than 1,600 “sexual safety incidents” in four years, shocking NHS figures reveal. ‘Sexual incidents’ ranged from sexualised comments to rape.

Despite warnings being sent to the health service at a rate of more than one a day since 2019 – a total of 1,643 sexual incident reports – and no action was taken to stop vulnerable NHS patients being sent to this unit.

The private unit is now finally due to be closed after an investigation by The Independent revealed allegations of verbal and physical abuse, prompting the NHS to withdraw patients. The hospital has since said it plans to reopen as an adult unit.

A Taplow Manor Patient’s Story

A patient at Taplow Manor claims she was abused and repeatedly raped as a child by a member of staff at a private CAMHS unit 20 years ago.

She said the sexual abuse that occurred was like a sort of open secret, and there was a huge culture of blaming patients as if they were fallen, worthless people. They added that staff would blame it on the patients calling them mad, as if it must have been their fault because of that and so they were sexually unboundaried.

Mandatory Reporting is important to ensure sexual abuse in institutions such as these is always reported. This in turn could solve a huge part of the problem by preventing and stopping any further abuse from happening again.

We see the experiences and successes of other countries where mandatory reporting legislation exists and it has a positive impact on preventing and stopping sexual abuse from happening, and so we should learn from this.