Where the hell were the staff?

What gets me is how could not one child in that class think "This is wrong, I don't want to be a part of it?"

Where the hell were the staff? 24 6 year old children should never be left unattended for even a minute, let alone every day for months !!!

It makes you wonder if a teacher was complicit.

If you are old enough to sexually abuse someone then you are old enough for the offenders register.

It does make you wonder how on earth the kids know about this stuff...At the age of six I was blissfully playing in the land of ignorance (or somewhere much more cool, like space or something)...
I guess part of the problem is, they are all so young, can they be held for their action? Do they know why they were doing it? Does a six year old raping another six year old have the same mentality as a 30 year old raping someone else?

Child A was stripped on a daily basis and routinely assaulted by children of her own age.

But a combination of the children’s young ages and a lack of firm evidence left both her teachers and local council to conclude that little could be done.

As a result, all the abusers were allowed to remain at the school.

The victim’s mother, who learned of the abuse from another parent, eventually moved her daughter to another school in a different area.

Her calls for an investigation were ignored until she took legal action, which prompted the local authority to launch a serious case review.

Its officers then took two years before publishing their findings on Thursday

The review concluded that while Child A had undoubtedly been the victim of sexually harmful behaviour, it was impossible to establish exactly what happened.

The school and the local education authority – neither of which can be named – said the fact that the abusers were under the age of criminal responsibility meant little action could be taken.

The Children’s Commissioner for Wales, Keith Towler, described the delay in investigating the girl’s torment as “a shocking failure”.

He went on: “The bottom line is that the family will never know what happened to their child.”

The case comes amid renewed debate about the criminal age of responsibility - which stands at 10 - after Maggie Atkinson, the Children's Commissioner, said that Jon Venables and Robert Thompson should not have been prosecuted in an adult court for the murder of James Bulger.

Child A’s mother said: “I will never forget the look on her face. I said 'It is ok, you can tell Mummy', and then it all started to come out.

"She was telling me things that I think every mother dreads to hear from their daughter. It was horrendous what she was going through.

"Every day she was being stripped, she was being physically and sexually abused every day and every day she cried out for help and nobody ever came. And I think you can’t excuse that. How can you possibly say that is OK and nobody is answerable for that?”

The mother said she feared her daughter would be traumatised for the rest of her life.

Mr Towler said he now planned to overhaul the serious case review process in Wales “to make sure they are much more timely published, within a year of incidents happening.”

Only then would it be possible to establish in future cases “what happened, why it happened and what we need to do to put things right.”

The commissioner also suggested that teachers needed on-going training so they were better equipped to recognise such incidents.

Senior officers at the local authority involved insist that the case review had been robust, and emphasised that the school had received excellent inspections both before and after the case.

Neelam Bhardwaja, president of the Directors of Social Services in Wales, said: “If there are these number of children involved, it begs the questions 'Where did that behaviour arise from?

'Why are these children behaving in this way? And are they from abusive situations themselves?'”