One of the most depressing things about being a political journalist in recent years has been the gulf between the Westminster psychodrama and what’s going on in the country at large. And in recent months, the implosion of the Conservative party – Downing Street parties, committee investigations, Cabinet resignations and leadership contests – has sucked the oxygen out of other important news stories.

But I don’t think I’ve ever felt this gap more sharply than during the last week of Liz Truss’s premiership. On the day she resigned, cameras were trained on Downing Street. The same morning, the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) published its final report and recommendations, the culmination of a seven-year public inquiry and no less than fifteen separate investigations into institutional child sexual abuse in the UK.

Child protection has got worse, not better, at preventing child sexual abuse in recent years, and this is a long-standing trend

This, not Liz Truss’s political fate, should have been at the top of all the news bulletins. Child sexual abuse is far more common than we like to think: three in twenty girls and one in twenty boys experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of sixteen. Some of that happens in the institutions that put adults in positions of power in relation to children, which were examined by the inquiry: schools, children’s homes, football clubs and the church. But the most common form of child sexual abuse is also the most taboo: the abuse that happens within families.

Child protection has got worse, not better, at preventing child sexual abuse in recent years, and this is a long-standing trend, not just a product of cuts to children’s services. The number of child protection plans that include child sexual abuse has dropped significantly since the early 1990s, despite the total number of plans increasing over this period. That’s certainly not because child sexual abuse is getting less common, but because social workers, teachers and medical professionals have become much less confident at spotting the signs in the wake of the Cleveland inquiry in the late 1980s, in which doctors and social workers were criticised for their “zeal” in intervening in suspected cases of abuse, despite clear signs it was going on in many cases.

Child sexual abuse is as common as physical and emotional child abuse. But because it is so taboo, there’s a tendency for child protection professionals to hold off from flagging it, because the perception is that it’s the worst thing a parent can be accused of. The Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, which offers training to social workers, says there’s a myth that you need to wait for children to make a verbal disclosure of sexual abuse – which they rarely do – rather than acting on non-verbal behavioural cues – and that too many trainee social workers receive little or no training in how to spot and address child sexual abuse.

IICSA made three key recommendations in their report: for a statutory requirement on professionals working with children to report suspected cases of child sexual abuse, a national redress scheme for England and Wales to make compensation more straightforward, and the creation of a new Child Protection Authority that will have the power to inspect any institution working with children. These will hopefully go some way to improving the way we as a society respond to child sexual abuse, but there is a risk that their impact will be limited without more comprehensive training on child sexual abuse for everyone who works with children. At the moment, the majority of children who suffer child sexual abuse do so in silence: the only adult who knows about what is happening to them is their abuser, who will too often threaten them about the consequences of speaking up, or say no one will believe them. We will only address the endemic nature of child sexual abuse if we tackle the misperception, often shared by professionals as well as the public, that it is vanishingly rare and perpetrated by men in “other” places to “other” children.

Rishi and race at No 10
Back to Westminster, and Britain’s first prime minister of colour, Rishi Sunak. What to make of it? Personally, I think two things can be true at once. It is hugely significant that Britain has its first prime minister of Indian heritage: it speaks to Britain’s success as a multicultural country, and is an important symbol that you don’t have to be white to get the top political job in the country.

At the same time, Sunak’s CV reads like that of so many other Conservative prime ministers – top public school, Oxbridge, worth a fortune. And his ultra-Conservative politics that mix fiscal hawkery with a blind spot for structural discrimination mean he is extremely unlikely to be a prime minister who tackles the fact that black people are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people, or that black young men are much more likely to be criminalised for marijuana use than white young men, or the discrimination faced by people of colour in the labour market. So yes, his elevation to the premiership is a positive for ethnic minority representation in Britain. But don’t expect him to make unpicking class and race-based discrimination a central part of his agenda.

Sonia Sodha is chief leader writer at the Observer and a Guardian/Observer columnist. She also presents Analysis documentaries for Radio 4