Child Sexual Exploitation

Baroness Bray of Coln Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) on securing this excellent debate, not least because it gives me the opportunity to tell the House about a dreadful case affecting the young daughter of a family that lives in my constituency that came to see me in my surgery last week. I am delighted to say that they are sitting up in the Gallery, listening to our debate.

At the age of 14, the daughter started being texted by the husband of a great friend of her mother’s. The texts apparently moved quickly from being simply manipulative to becoming more and more explicitly sexual. He was grooming and exploiting her for his own pleasure. Before long, these texts began to take a toll on her mental health. Her school work started slipping, and she developed anxieties about things like leaving the house unaccompanied. Her parents noticed this and wondered whether she might need the help of a psychologist; indeed, their daughter started going to see one. This young girl was trying to bear the burden of this appalling ongoing situation on her shoulders alone, because she thought she would be upsetting her mother by telling her about her friend’s husband. I have no doubt at all that this might well have been one of the reasons why he thought he would get away with it.

Eventually, early this year, when the texts started again after a break over Christmas, she broke down and explained what was really happening. Her parents rushed to report it to the police, and the man, in his late 20s, was immediately arrested. According to the parents, the police were absolutely brilliant and very supportive. They saw some of the texts and said they were indeed manipulative and completely inappropriate for sending to a young girl. However, there was a problem. Rather unsurprisingly, the young girl had deleted the vast majority of the texts, particularly the worst ones—and who could blame her? They were, as she told her parents, truly awful. Those that she still had, however, were enough to trigger the bringing of a case by the Crown Prosecution Service.

The most significant development was that the accused man admitted everything of which the girl had accused him. He admitted having sent her all those texts, perhaps because he did not know that she had deleted them. He admitted everything in a written statement, including the fact that he had asked her to meet up in some of the texts. It is reckoned that he had sent her more than 2,000 texts over 18 months or so, most of them of a horrific nature. According to the girl’s mother, he had even texted her across the table on occasions when the family went to visit him and his wife for a meal. How obsessive and frightening must that have been for a young girl who felt that the whole situation was something that she was completely unable to control?

The CPS certainly found what the young girl had to say sufficiently compelling to press the charge of intending to meet up with a minor for the purpose of rape. The man pleaded not guilty. While on bail before the trial—this shows how seriously the case was being taken—he was subject to extremely severe restrictions, including electronic tagging, a curfew and the confiscation of his passport. Meanwhile, the young girl was still understandably traumatised by it all. She almost entirely stopped attending school, and needed the support of her mother—who had to leave her own job—private tutors, the school and a psychologist in order to get through her GCSEs.

The trial finally took place last month. The charge was changed to intending to meet up with a minor for the purposes of sexual activity. The police advised the parents not to attend because the content of the messages was so distressing, so another family member stepped in. The young girl was grilled by the defendant’s QC via a video link. As I said earlier, the defendant himself had admitted everything in a written statement, including fantasising about her and “falling for her”. This, however, was the actual result of the trial: because no meeting had actually taken place, although the man had asked the young girl to meet him many times in texts, the judge was compelled to instruct the jury to find him not guilty. However, he certainly registered his utter contempt for the defendant, saying that he did not like him and refusing to grant him costs although he was to walk out of the court free.

The family are, of course, absolutely devastated. They feel that no justice has been done. The young girl is obviously very angry as well as upset, and is still badly affected by it all. Matters were made worse when the family heard that the man and his own family had held a large celebration party just down the road.

I am no expert on legal matters, but if that case reveals a gap in our legal system, surely it needs attention. The family have made it clear that they fully recognise that the judge was undoubtedly left with no choice on the issue of intentions not being turned into actions, namely meeting. They also understand that the CPS was trying to go for the bigger sentence, and therefore pressed more serious charges rather than concentrating on the texts themselves. However, the family have now run out of time in which to take the man to court over the texts in a separate case, and in any event they have been told that there would be a much less serious charge that would only attract a fine.

Surely this is most unsatisfactory. A young girl of 14 has been verbally raped, and a man twice her age has been forcing his unwanted attentions on her, which she could not resist. Surely it is likely that if his texts had been racist or homophobic, he would be behind bars by now. What protection are we offering young girls in circumstances like my young constituent? We must do better, and, if necessary, we must have new legal sanctions.