Child Sexual Exploitation

Margot James Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi). I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) and the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) for co-sponsoring this important debate on child sexual exploitation, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing time for it. I also recognise the good work of the former Member for Rotherham, the right hon. Denis MacShane, and thank him for his role in securing the debate.

What we have heard reported in the press in recent weeks and months has been, as the deputy Children’s Commissioner Sue Berelowitz said, so terrible that it beggars belief. That has been part of the reason that the abuse has gone on for so many years. The vulnerable young people who have been abused were simply not believed by the people to whom they went for help. The impunity with which Savile went about his hypocritical reign of abuse over three decades was also aided by the silence in which most of his vulnerable victims endured their fate. I hope that those victims, who have been silent or not believed for so long, will be able to get justice at this late stage.

I will focus on the method of exploitation that differs from that of the lone perpetrator, but is systematically organised by gangs of men working together. I want to take issue with a few of the comments made by the hon. Member for Bolton South East on the issue of men of Pakistani origin abusing vulnerable white girls. I congratulate The Times and its journalist Andrew Norfolk on their campaign to expose this previously under-reported method of abuse. I agree that methodology is a key part of it, but even though most of the victims have been under the age of consent, too many professionals regarded them as prostitutes who were somehow complicit in their own rape and abuse. I support calls from Barnardo’s and The Children’s Society to end the use of the term “child prostitute”—it is a misnomer.

One mother in Rochdale, whose daughters were targeted by abusers, gave police and social workers the names and nicknames of more than a dozen men who had raped her daughter. She pleaded for her daughters to be put under child protection, but they were just regarded as bad kids. There seems to have been a complete failure by the adult professionals to understand the nature of the problem and the vulnerability of the victims.

We heard earlier from the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk), in a moving and shocking speech, about the director for children, schools and families in his borough who recognised, with the benefit of hindsight and recent local learning, that we missed some opportunities to offer more support and assistance to those children in 2008 and 2009. However, the problem did not emerge in 2008. It had been going on for much longer than that.

A woman I know, who I will call Samina—that is not her real name—was raised in Oldham. She described to me her experience at school 20 years ago. She told me that a lot of the men were, like her, ex-Pakistani: restaurant workers and market stall holders—men who had some money. They abused younger, white girls under the cover of the market stalls to conceal their behaviour from the police. She told me that her friends were well aware of what was going on, and that those girls were being used in the vans in which market stall keepers stored what they sold on the stalls, but everybody just kept quiet. It progressed then to brothels above kebab shops.

It is clear that the authorities were inhibited—this is why the ethnicity angle is important and we must not shy away from it—from acting for fear of being called racist.

We have heard mention of the former Member for Keighley, Mrs Ann Cryer, who was attacked continually in her constituency for raising this problem. Later, the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), a former Home Secretary, spoke the truth when he said that young men were targeting white girls because Pakistani heritage girls were off limits, but some of his parliamentary colleagues said that his comments perpetuated racist attitudes. I pay tribute to work done by parts of the Asian community to tackle this problem by being honest about its roots—groups such as the Ramadhan Foundation, led by Mohammed Shafiq.

My hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins) said that we need to tackle the underlying causes and attitudes that lead to so many forms of violence against women. The inability of Asian women to tackle the problem is compounded, however, by the isolation of too many of their number. When I meet community groups in my constituency, unless I organise a women-only event, I will meet only men. At the women’s events, I need an interpreter, because many of the group will speak little or no English, as a result of which their employment opportunities are severely limited. Being unable to participate fully in life outside the home or in public life means that such women are disempowered, forced to be dependants and end up living in a closed community—and, as we know from other communities, closed communities can sweep heinous crimes, such as child abuse, under the carpet, because they are perceived to threaten the community as a whole. That has been as true of parts of the Catholic priesthood as the community I am speaking about.

We must press for greater integration, better education and more opportunities for poorer Asian women to make a life outside the home, so that they can play a bigger part in challenging their communities and bringing pressure to bear on the small minority of rogue men who are bringing their communities into disrepute.

In its recent report on child protection, the Education Committee wrote:

“We are struck by the number of submissions which noted that some forms of abuse, including forced marriage, ritual abuse, female genital mutilation, honour-based violence”—

so-called—

“and trafficking, are often only secondarily cast as child abuse: they are primarily seen as problems of integration, community or immigration. Casting them as something other than child abuse can mean that child victims are stigmatised”.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

The hon. Lady refers to Asian males committing crimes against young white girls. How does she explain Jimmy Savile abusing white girls? In the Welsh care homes, it was white males committing crimes against little white boys. In other cases, ethnicity and religion do not come into it.

[Margot James]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, because it gives me the opportunity to make it absolutely clear that I am only talking about one group-related way of exploiting young children—predominantly girls. There are many other groups and individuals, about whom she spoke eloquently, who indulge in this practice as well, but I am afraid that in the instances I have raised the abuse has gone undetected and unacknowledged by children’s services, social workers and the police in our northern cities because they have been frightened of being called racists. We have to confront that issue head on.

There needs to be more support for the excellent women’s organisations that challenge the negative stereotyping of women and try to improve the situation. There are many, but I would like to mention just one, Jeena, representatives of which spoke at the Conservative Women’s Forum of MPs last week. It works on a shoestring, but is making good progress in challenging negative attitudes to Asian girls and women in schools. Clearly, it could do more with greater resources. I was shocked to hear from Jeena that a lot of schools will not accept its educational programmes, because they fear that parents will take their children out of those schools and place them in other schools that do not raise these difficult issues. That is shocking, so I hope the Minister will raise it with Education Ministers, because we have to change the mindset in some of our schools.

I want to end on prosecutions. Men who are tempted to exploit vulnerable young people need to know not only that their behaviour is unacceptable, but that there will be a far higher likelihood of a prison sentence than there has been to date. There have been far too few prosecutions. Home Office research published in the “Paying the Price” report set the number of victims of sexual exploitation at around 5,000 a year in England and Wales, yet there were only 55 prosecutions in 2009 and 57 in 2010. On the basis of those figures, there is currently a 1% chance of conviction. No wonder the crime is growing.

Mention has been made of the nine inquiries into wider sexual abuse issues, which obviously span a far greater diversity of things than I have been able to mention in my 10 minutes. I support calls for one overarching inquiry that investigates and identifies the lessons learned from young people, social services and the wider societal discrimination against young girls and women, which I have tried to highlight. An overarching inquiry would be able to make recommendations on how specialist police resources should be best deployed to maximise the number of prosecutions from yesteryear, as well as the present day. That will be the acid test of an effective inquiry in this area.