An embargoed report was snuck out at midnight, last night.

Just imagine, for one moment, that this report concerned 436 Football coaches dismissed in one 24 month period for ‘abuse of authority for sexual gain’: or 436 Catholic priests dismissed over the same period for ‘abuse of authority for sexual gain’ – the cyber waves would have been alive. We would have been enduring an endless diet of breakfast TV ‘analysis’ over the past 24 months as the victims were paraded by their various agents and their legal representatives. We would have started with one victim bravely waving their anonymity and the NSPCC starting up a special help line calling for more victims to come forward. Legal representatives, specialising in cases of sexual abuse, would have assured us that the victims merely wanted closure but would be mounting a civil case as well…

Yet one institution has managed to stay out of the limelight whilst racking up a horrifying total of 436 victims of sexual abuse. How could that be?

Welcome to the 2016 report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC).

The perpetrators of these 436 sexual abuses were all police officers or employees of police forces.

Last year Slater and Gordon represented 1,050 Police Federation members in criminal and misconduct proceedings. Could this be the reason we have not seen personal injury specialists from Slater & Gordon highlighting the harm done to ‘their’ clients by employees of this institution taking advantage of their position of authority to abuse vulnerable individuals?

In 2012, HMIC highlighted what they saw as the growing problem of sexual abuse by police officers that “fundamentally betrays the trust that communities and individuals place in the police” in a little noticed report helpfully titled ‘The abuse of police powers to perpetrate sexual violence’. Four years later they returned to document the improvement they had hoped to see.

We were concerned to find that […] most forces still need to improve the way they recognise and prevent this form of serious corruption.

In fact, in 2016, only one force had managed to get through the period without any of its employees sexually abusing anyone…the individual reports are here, and Ms Raccoon doesn’t intend to go through each one by hand to find out which force it was!

Of the 436 cases HMIC identified, less than half had even been referred to the IPCC. The Police, it appears, on even less keen to investigate cases of sexual abuse committed by its own employees than those other institutions they are so keen to shine a spotlight on.

This comes a matter of days after the ‘football abuse scandal’ was highlighted by one Andrew Woodward. That Andrew Woodward was allegedly fired following claims of sexual misconduct on November 4th – all of 21 days before he went public with his claims on November 25th to have been a victim of sexual abuse that the ‘force had failed to investigate properly’ has been the subject of a vicious war between ‘anonymous editors’ on Wikipedia, resulting in the page being locked for editing other than by senior editors….

“What can be worse than a guardian abusing the trust and confidence of an abused person? There can be no greater violation of public trust.”

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*Please don’t take this post as an indication that this blog is reopening for normal service. I have had a thoroughly sleepless night, and can only type with one hand now that the cancer has progressed down my left arm.

However, Ms Raccoon’s love of original material as opposed to the mainstream media’s spin on such material is well known. This report has such ramifications that it has tempted me out of my silence. I thought that you might appreciate links to the original material, since it took Sky till 4am to even refer to the report, and they were never going to let you read the orignal yourself….