Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

Lee Anderson Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I welcome the work my hon. Friend has done in this policy area. He is right to talk about young people and children being trafficked around the country. There is some concerning evidence that, for example, although work has been done to identify people being trafficked through county lines—often boys and young men—it has not sufficiently identified the young women and teenage girls who are being trafficked around for sexual exploitation. We need to ensure that improvements are made in that regard.

[Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Reform)]

The Labour lot over there are banging on about playing politics with this important issue, but the last time I attended a debate on child rape gangs only one Labour Back Bencher turned up. They should hang their heads in shame. Does the Home Secretary agree that we need a specific inquiry into why young British white girls are being systematically raped by men of Pakistani heritage?

[Yvette Cooper]

We need to make sure that young people and children are being protected. These are vile crimes against children. Across the country we have seen young girls, teenagers and young boys who have been exploited by perpetrators in the most cruel and horrendous way. We have seen abuse by Pakistani-heritage gangs, we have seen paedophile gangs operating online, we have seen abuse in communities and institutions and family homes, and all those crimes are truly horrendous.

After the Rotherham inquiry in 2014, when we saw appalling abuse by, in that case, a Pakistani-heritage gang, I called for a duty to report. I called for the law to be changed to place a responsibility on public servants to report child abuse, and to make it an offence to cover it up. The Government of whom the hon. Gentleman was a part for many years failed to bring in that duty to report, and we have lost a decade. We have to change the law. We have to make sure that we go after abuse without fear or favour, wherever it is found, in order to secure justice and protection for victims, and that dangerous perpetrators end up behind bars.