Sexual Exploitation: Protection of 16 and 17-year-olds

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I will quickly knock two minutes off my speech, Madam Deputy Speaker.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) and to hear about some of the good work going on in Scotland. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), ably supported by the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey), on securing this debate.

I also congratulate the Children’s Society on its “Old enough to know better?” report. As a former Minister with responsibility for this area, I did a lot with the Children’s Society, including meeting the victims of child exploitation whom it was taking care of, as well as runaways. I saw at first hand the excellent work that it did, and which it continues to do.

I am delighted that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), has taken over the Government’s cross-cutting role on this whole very important area of child sexual exploitation. I am delighted to say that she is very ably shadowed by the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion). It is good to see the shadow children Minister, the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), in the Chamber as well.

This subject is not aired enough in the House, despite the fact that the profile of child sexual exploitation in this country has never been higher, thanks to high-profile celebrity prosecutions and the series of virtually weekly reports of historical sexual abuse coming from the BBC, celebrities, care homes, schools, boarding schools, music schools, churches, church institutions and so on. As my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire said, the trouble is that the vast majority of child sexual exploitation still taking place in this country is done not by celebrities or by people in high-profile positions, but by ordinary people and, in many cases, relatives of the victims.

At long last, the Lowell Goddard inquiry, which many of us called for, is taking place. Its work will take a long time, and it will continue to put a lot of pressure on the police investigating historical cases. Putting the historical sexual abuse cases aside, however, we have a problem—here and now—with contemporary child sex abuse, and specifically for those transitioning from childhood to adulthood.

The age at which one becomes an adult has always been a grey area. Through the all-party group on children, we have done some work on the relationship between children and young people and the police. That work has led to a recognition that, in the eyes of the law, and certainly for young people taken into custody, a 17-year-old is a child and must be treated as such. The Home Secretary has reacted very favourably to that work and has made changes. The status of 16 and 17-year-olds has been problematic since the age of consent was raised to 16 back in 1885.

My hon. Friend mentioned the introduction of child abduction warning notices. When there are concerns, they can be used to disrupt contact between a vulnerable child and an adult. Children under 16 are protected, but 16 and 17-year-olds are covered only if they are in the full care of a local authority under an order under section 31 of the 1989 Act. That leaves an awful lot of children who might be exposed. The recent report by the Children’s Commissioner on child sexual abuse in the family network highlighted the extent and complexities of the problem.

Some 70,000 children are in the care system, and this is still a very big problem, despite the changes to residential children’s homes, through regulations that I instituted some years ago, to prevent children’s homes from being sited in areas where there are a lot of sex offenders as well as other temptations and dangers to young children. Children in care still suffer from huge poverty of achievement, and the Government still need to go a long way towards addressing that.

I have mentioned the Children’s Commissioner’s excellent report, which came out last month. The most shocking finding she came up with is that, between 2012 and 2014, there were between 400,000 and 450,000 victims of child sexual abuse, but only 50,000 of them were known to statutory agencies. That means that only one in eight cases of sexual abuse are actually picked up by the authorities. Some 11.3% of young adults aged between 18 and 24 had experienced contact sexual abuse during their childhood. About two thirds of all child sexual abuse occurs in or around the family—involving relatives or close and trusted family friends—with all the implications that has of cases being swept under the carpet, of victims being afraid of speaking up or bullied into not doing so, and of family discord. It is likely that children from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and boys in particular, are under-represented in the data. As my hon. Friend mentioned, children with learning disabilities are particularly vulnerable and are particularly unlikely to be able to report, even if they wish to, or to understand that they have been the victims of a crime.

There is a bigger issue in that, in many cases, children do not really appreciate that they are victims, but feel that they have, in some way, brought it on themselves. A few years ago, disgraceful comments were made about how a 14 or 15-year-old girl in care could in some way bring sexual abuse on herself. That is absolutely outrageous, and anybody who agrees with such comments has no place anywhere near child social care. They are children, and if someone old enough to be a girl’s father or grandfather has sexual relations with her, that is a crime. Such people must be treated as criminals, and prosecuted and persecuted as such.

There is also the issue of how children actually tell someone. The report by the Children’s Commissioner revealed that a failure to listen to children and young people has resulted in a failure to identify abuse. Indeed, child sexual abuse often comes to the attention of statutory and non-statutory agencies as a result of a secondary presenting factor that becomes the focus of intervention.

There is a big role for schools in this whole issue. According to the report, the majority of respondents said that they tried to tell their mother, a friend, a peer or a teacher. There is a problem of parents being in denial about the involvement of close relatives in child sexual abuse, or being ill-equipped to detect it or to know exactly what is going on. In schools, we need to get much smarter about how we pick up or detect it. I remember going to a school in Stafford and having the privilege of sitting in on an interview with a full-time social worker employed by the school. A young girl—a 15-year-old—who had come to see the social worker broke down halfway through the interview and revealed that she was being abused by her stepfather. Nobody had had any clue about that, so there was clearly something wrong. We need to be able to pick such things up in schools, and we need better training for teachers and school staff to detect such things.

There is also the hoary old chestnut of sex and relationships education: the Children’s Commissioner’s report showed that not having had any sex education or having had only poor quality sex education undermined the ability of vulnerable youngsters to understand that the abuse was wrong and should be reported. We need to do more to ensure that young girls have the confidence to say no when sex is forced on them, and to understand that they have the right to say no. There is also the issue that about a quarter of cases involve perpetrators who are themselves under the age of 18. There is a real problem of young-on-young sexual abuse.

The Government have a good record in starting to approach this issue. The child sexual exploitation action plan, which I launched back in November 2011, has produced many practical results. The Home Office produced a CSE report earlier this year. Since last year, there have been new sentencing guidelines for courts, enabling courts to give individuals more severe sentences in cases where the victims were particularly vulnerable, such as 16 and 17-year-olds.

Much has happened, but much more needs to happen. The Children’s Commissioner’s report is very relevant to this debate. It highlights the need for the Government to step up their response to this huge problem with a truly cross-Government strategy. In this debate, we have rightly raised serious concerns about 16 and 17-year-olds, but that is only part of a much bigger issue that we are only just beginning to get on top of. However, I congratulate my hon. Friend on bringing this matter before the House.