PI Brief Update

Historic Sexual Abuse: Where Next for Pi Claims? - Catarina Sjölin Knight, Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Law School and door tenant at 36 Bedford Row

25/05/14. Since sex abuse allegations against Jimmy Savile hit the headlines in late 2012 and the Metropolitan Police began Operation Yewtree, historic sexual abuse has rarely been absent from the media. Recent crime figures seem to show a surge in reports of sexual offences. There is a judicially-approved compensation scheme to provide Savile’s victims with capped payments from the Savile estate (following scrutiny of each case by an appointed barrister) which has been advertised in the national press. Where does this leave PI practitioners? Will there be a deluge of historic sexual abuse cases against the perpetrators of the abuse? Are erstwhile employers of abusers – and their insurers – staring into a financial pit? How will the courts deal with these claims; is it time for a quicker, cheaper method of settling them?

Are more historic allegations of sexual abuse being reported to the police? The most recent statistics on crime do show an increase in reporting of both rape and other sexual offending in the first full year since the Savile allegations became public: rape reports are up by 20% whilst the reporting of other sexual offences has risen by 15%. If we take ‘historic’ offences to be those allegedly committed one year or more before the report to the police, the best estimate suggests that 30% of the sexual offence reports to the police last year were historic (around 18,000 reports). As to the increase in reporting, around half of that was down to...

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