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Aspersions are being cast in some of the local fora and media sites about Lenny Harper. These remarks often concern the media handling on the investigation at Haut de la Garenne. Even national newspapers were, it is claimed, misled. Some kind of investigative reporters they must be! Well I have a different view – as I have said in the senatorial election hustings, and elsewhere, Lenny Harper is a hero.
I have not described him as a deity, or a paragon, a saviour or a visionary but a hero. I know he is not infallible; he is after all a human being just like you, me, Stuart Syvret, and 6.6 billion others on this planet. So what makes Lenny different, a hero?
To understand this you need to appreciate a couple of well known and frankly obvious facts about being in care, especially institutional care. Anyone in care over the age of about 5 is all too aware that they are different. Society views children in care differently, and not positively: detritus at best, dangerous proto criminals more typically. Yet the majority of children in care are there because they need protection from those who should be protecting and nurturing them. Children in this situation don’t have much of a voice, who is going to listen to them? But it gets worse. What do you think is the self-esteem level of children in care, knowing that’s what the world thinks?
Now on top of all that, which applies to a very large proportion of children in care, add the special problems of having been abused, or even having been a witness to abuse in a home. Not just any old abuser, but the people who are there to look after you, the ones who are in authority over you. If you are brave enough to think to complain or take issue, whom do you tell? Someone else in authority of course, another professional. Who’s story are they going to believe? A troubled powerless oik, or a fellow respected professional who could make you own professional life awkward?
If you have understood any of the above you will readily appreciate the big, very big, issues care leavers have with authority figures. That includes of course the police. This is a mountain of a problem because the police are effectively a monopoly –only they can investigate child abuse and bring the perpetrators to justice. But to do that requires evidence and in this sort of case that evidence starts with witness statements – ideally multiple corroborating independent witness statements. Apart from a few staff that come forward, those statements come, of course, from the victims and survivors.
So how do you as a police investigator acquire the evidence of victim witnesses if they wont come forward because they have a well-founded mistrust of authority? You go out to win trust. You communicate, you are as open and transparent as possible, and you take the information given to you by victims and survivors, initially at least, at face value. You treat those discarded, un-regarded, little heard and never respected care leavers like proper human beings.
And that is what makes Lenny Harper a hero to many victims and survivors. The simple act of treating others in the way they should have been treated all along, and thereby gaining their trust. So very simple and effective. Well over a hundred people have come forward.
Isn’t it odd? The very thing that many people seek to criticise about Mr Harper’s handling of the investigations is the very aspect that worked as far as the survivors and victims are concerned. And it is the survivors and victims who are the paramount concern here, isn’t it?
