Child Sexual Offender Data
Debate between Jamie Stone and Gregory Stafford(1 week, 5 days ago)
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Jamie Stone
Wise words indeed.
To turn to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) touched on earlier, in England and Wales alone almost half of all child sexual abuse offences reported to the police in 2021 and 2022 took place in the family environment. That means the abuse was by parents, siblings, grandparents or anyone considered one of the family. After sexual abuse by a parent, harmful sexual behaviour by siblings is the second most common form of sexual abuse within the family environment that is reported to police.
My point is that we must be cautious about framing child sexual abuse as primarily an external or culturally othered threat, when the evidence shows that it is most often perpetrated within existing relationships of trust and care. I suggest that overemphasising outside narratives risks distorting public understanding and could distract from the full range of contexts in which abuse occurs.
Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)
Although I accept the hon. Gentleman’s wider point, given that we are about to have a national grooming gang inquiry that Opposition Members had to drag the Government, kicking and screaming, to do, would it not be helpful for that inquiry to have the data? Surely sunlight is the best disinfectant on this issue?
Jamie Stone
Of course, the Minister will sum up. It will be interesting to hear the Government’s view on this.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Debate between Jamie Stone and Gregory Stafford(6 months, 1 week ago)
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Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for outlining the Government’s supposed intention for the Bill, but is he aware that Amanda Spielman, the former Ofsted chief inspector, said that this Bill was “very likely” to have a detrimental effect on children’s education?
Jamie Stone
I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. That point was made in the consultation I had before this debate.
To continue, the Bill proposes wellbeing co-ordinators, structured mental health assessments and greater collaboration with community health services to embed wellbeing alongside literacy and numeracy as part of what every school must nurture. These are noble aims. Heaven knows, if a child is struggling mentally, they are not going to learn very much about trigonometry, are they?
We must approach the issues that campaigners have with the Bill. Previous Governments have spent decades giving academies and trusts more and more control, only for this Government to take it away again. Sometimes the best way to support wellbeing is to give schools freedom, not more top-down rules. In some instances, an attempt to standardise pay would mean giving our teachers in academies pay cuts. School groups have emphasised to me that the importance of local decision making cannot be underestimated.