Grooming Gangs

Chris Clarkson Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure and an honour to follow the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion). She has given so much by giving a voice to the voiceless in this Chamber. I pay tribute to her work over eight years. I also pay tribute to her and to my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Imran Ahmad Khan) for the work they have done to help form the Government’s strategy on CSE through the external reference group. I would like to sound a note of caution. This is an excellent first step in getting some measure of justice for the survivors of CSE, but it is not an endpoint in and of itself. We have a lot more work to do.

The other day I had the opportunity to speak to Maggie Oliver and other Greater Manchester police officers as part of the all-party parliamentary group for whistleblowing, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson). Maggie Oliver rightly pointed out, when I talked about historical child abuse, that these crimes are actually still ongoing and are very often unseen, and that is why this new strategy is so important.

Rightly, the first objective of the strategy is to tackle the abuse and bring offenders to justice. I cannot stress enough how important that is. Justice has to be seen to be done. The people who commit these wicked acts and rob young people of their childhoods should be removed from decent society—including those who would seek to abuse the courts and try to frustrate deportation orders and other sanctions used to protect the victims.

As well as robust intelligence sharing and wider improvements to the criminal justice system such as an additional 20,000 police officers, 10,000 prison places and an extra £85 million for the Crown Prosecution Service, we need to send a clear signal that the law is there to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. I welcome the national vulnerability action plan and place-based strategies that respond to threats within communities, such as child sexual exploitation, by making use of a range of data and local stakeholders. Powerlessness has been the sad thread running through all our work on this. Any measure that gives a voice to those communities and individuals dealing with this on a day-to-day basis has to be welcome.

I also put on the record my support for the Home Office’s commitment to educate children and young people about healthy relationships in the digital world, through the roll-out of the relationship, sex and health education and media literacy strategy, along with targeted support that protects children and young people from offenders seeking to exploit their vulnerabilities.

When I think of the victims in my own constituency whose story was so powerfully portrayed in the drama “Three Girls” and the documentary “The Betrayed Girls”, it is not hard to see how the system that should have shielded them from harm let them down so very badly. It took the courage of a few individuals to stand up for those whose voices the system chose not to hear. But not every victim has a Sara Rowbotham or a Maggie Oliver willing to put their own livelihood and reputation on the line just to see justice done. We must make sure that the system itself is reformed.

In the Westminster Hall debate on Operation Augusta part 1, we heard the ways in which power was shirked and responsibility ignored while those in power worked to protect themselves in the face of unspeakable abuse. Although part 2 of Operation Augusta, focusing on Rochdale, has not yet been released, I fear that we already have a strong sense of what it will tell us.

That one child has been abused physically, emotionally or sexually should be a cause for sorrow and anger in equal measure; that these awful crimes should have been permitted on a near-industrial scale, aided and abetted by the practised disinterest of the authorities, should cause horror and serious reflection. I thank those who have dedicated so much of themselves and their time to tackling this hateful behaviour and I stand with them, fully committed to doing whatever it takes to give justice to those so very badly let down.