Rachel Taylor
Main Page: Rachel Taylor (Labour - North Warwickshire and Bedworth)Department Debates - View all Rachel Taylor's debates with the Home Office
(2 days, 18 hours ago)
Commons ChamberUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
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I am grateful to the hon. Lady. She makes an incredibly important point, and hopefully she will know and understand how seriously this Government take those issues. We made an ambitious manifesto commitment to halve violence against women and girls over 10 years. That is something that, as Ministers in the Home Office with the Home Secretary and the Safeguarding Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), we are working at pace to address. We take these matters very seriously, and she is absolutely right to identify the particular challenges that exist online. The Safeguarding Minister will have more to say about this in due course.
I am grateful to the Security Minister for his words today. He has successfully exposed the reports about the leak as the nonsense they are. But there are serious issues here, including around how we respond to the rising level of youth violence and extremism and the increasing availability of online material that fuels that obsession with violence and death. Will he tell us how the intelligence services are approaching this challenge and what more the Government can do to stop young people disappearing into this dangerous abyss?
My hon. Friend raises an important point, and the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have both recently referred to this, including during their statements on 21 February. She is right that there has been a troubling rise in the number of cases involving youth men, boys and teenagers who are being drawn into extremism. As I said to the House earlier, that includes a range of different areas, including Islamist and far-right extremism, but also there is a particularly concerning rise in those drawn into what is referred to as mixed and confused ideology, and those young men and boys who have an obsession with violence. This threat is not unique to the United Kingdom; it is being experienced internationally, but I assure her that the intelligence services and our law enforcement partners are working with Government at pace, along with our international partners, to look at what more we can do in this particular area.