Sexual Exploitation: Protection of 16 and 17-year-olds

Ruth Cadbury Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Thank you for your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker, and a very happy Christmas to you too. I also thank hon. Members for securing this debate and the Backbench Business Committee for allowing it to happen today.

Many Members have mentioned the excellent Children’s Society report, “Old enough to know better?” They have rightly described the situation for already vulnerable children—those in care, suffering mental health difficulties or dangerously exploiting drugs and alcohol, for example—but I shall focus on mobile and online sexual exploitation, to which all young people with smartphones are vulnerable. By not tackling that effectively, we risk setting another set of young people on the path to vulnerability, serious mental health problems and drink and drugs exploitation. We also have to recognise that many young people, while being victims, could also, if we are not careful, be defined as perpetrators. The law has to be right and work in tandem with other approaches.

I thank Kevin Prunty, an experienced headteacher in Hounslow and executive head of the successful Cranford schools partnership, for helping me to prepare for this debate. He has direct experience of this situation and has some solutions I know he wants to share with the Minister.

The Children’s Society report recommendations apply to child sex abuse wherever and however it occurs, but there is justification for further consideration of mobile and online culture and the ways of helping to prevent the abuse, and to reduce the vulnerability to abuse, of 16 and 17-year-olds. In particular, the report does not address aspects of proactive prevention crucial to success in this field. Some important aspects of child online and mobile safety and of the equalities agenda are totally ignored, not just in the report, but seemingly by all the agencies and initiatives that Mr Prunty has come across.

We need to work in key areas, with cross-political support, to help schools and parents to safeguard children much more effectively than is possible merely by amending the law. The guidance says that child sexual exploitation can occur through the use of technology without the child’s immediate recognition. The definition of child sexual exploitation in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 includes merely the recording of an indecent image of a young person. The key findings of “Old enough to know better?” focus on strengthening the law. This age group is particularly vulnerable and inadvertently more vulnerable because of the potential for clumsy, inappropriate or disproportionate use of regulation and legislation.

It is right to strengthen the law to afford these children the same protections as younger children, but it is the continuum with the circumstances prior to the age of 16 that makes them so vulnerable as they mature, particularly online. Tackling offenders and strengthening the law, while important, are only a small part of what needs to be done and are not, on their own, the real solution. Merely strengthening the law will do little good for the majority and will not address those who could become victims. We need to protect children earlier, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) said, and proactively to prevent abuse.

The law in this area is designed primarily to tackle the serious offences committed particularly by adults against young people. The Children’s Society report and the work of most agencies and organisations tasked with online safety, although extremely valuable, focus too narrowly on already vulnerable children and fail to address the context of young people’s lives more widely. The recommendations in the report focus on reaction rather than prevention. I want more resourcing, more strategies and action to provide an appropriate adult presence—not necessarily the police—in the mobile and cyber world, in which many young children spend huge amounts of their time growing up without us.

In this respect, the law must not be used where young people are engaging in unwise activities, which many do, that relate to the expectation and culture of a mobile and cyber environment in which appropriate adults have virtually no presence and where we too often leave the young people abandoned to fend for themselves. Here is a quote from Mr Prunty on the issue:

“In running schools and elsewhere, I always contend that a strong positive culture must dominate any community, including online and mobile, because in its absence there will never be a vacuum and instead street culture will fill the void.”

In strengthening the law for 16 and 17-year-olds, steps must be taken to ensure the system does not end up targeting and criminalising young people who are in fact victims themselves. It will also require significant training and support for the police and others whose response to such crimes appears already to be under-confident and variable. Mr Prunty’s schools subscribe to a restorative justice approach, and this may be appropriate in cases where mitigating factors are considered.

Naïve online activity by 16 and 17-year-olds, which would also be subject to any strengthening of the law, such as online and mobile communication between peers, will be most frequent, is perhaps more detectable and could be easier to prosecute. It is important to remember, however, that in most cases 16 and 17-year-olds will actually remain victims even when they break such laws in the context and environment of the school and the world they occupy.

The vast majority of our young people are already mobile and already online victims in a largely unsupervised cyber world. Although the internet gets considerable attention from safeguarding organisations and in training, mobile activity and mobile-based abuse are, in fact, even more rife yet also more neglected by adults. Parents, teachers and other adults responsible for the routine safety of children are often best placed to supervise and guide young people, but they are largely absent from this dangerous environment. We tend to operate in Facebook, but young people are not on Facebook so much nowadays. The mobile world, and to some extent the dark web, get less attention, yet these are really part of most young people’s experiences—day and night.

I believe that the figures quoted in the Children’s Society report are actually a huge under-representation of the scale of the underlying problem. It is the underlying problem that contributes to a culture and environment that make identified sexual offences more probable and possible. In effect, it normalises them in the minds of young people, especially girls. I contest that a much larger proportion of 16 and 17-year-olds—boys and girls to differing degrees—experiences sexual and other harassment, abuse and pressure, and for many this is regular and unrelenting. Sometimes they take part in it, too. This normalisation, with no appropriate adult presence to challenge it, is what leads to the lack of reporting of sexual and other mobile, online and cyber-abuse. I support all the recommendations in the report, but feel that they are insufficient and incomplete without recommendations aimed at establishing a different online, mobile and cyberculture and skilling up children, parents and other adults.

I am short of time, so in conclusion I welcome the Minister’s announcement of the What Works review and hope that she will consider the specific issues of mobile and online sexual exploitation. I hope she will look not only at the already vulnerable children, but at the policies of all those who work with all our children, so that consistent, deliverable and effective solutions can be achieved, rather than just punishment under the law.