Blackpool’s forsaken children

Jan 7, 2023 by

by Julie Bindel, UnHerd:

In 2007, I spent time in Blackpool investigating the disappearance of Charlene Downes, a 14-year-old whose body has never been found. She was one of hundreds of girls in the town targeted by sexual predators who would groom and then rape their victims before pimping them to multiple men in exchange for alcohol, cigarettes and food.

During my investigation, I accompanied police officers to an amusement arcade where Charlene had been last seen. The detectives were looking out for any of the men under suspicion for her disappearance. During that two hour visit, over 30 convicted male sex offenders were later identified from CCTV footage. That’s one premises, in one night, in one town.

Blackpool, one of the most deprived parts of England, is rife with child abuse and home to a higher number of convicted child sex offenders than anywhere else in the country. It is thought that predatory men gravitate there to seek out vulnerable children. They don’t have to look far — there are three times the national average of children in care in Blackpool.

The sex trade – both legal and illegal – is rife. The proliferation of lap dance clubs and bars catering to groups of men on stag weekends has given the town a reputation as a haven for sex tourists. Queen Street, which is a focus for Blackpool’s night life, has also seen an increase in underage prostitution. Last year there were 87 visits by police and local authority inspectors to premises where children were believed to be sexually exploited.

Lisa* is a serving police officer in Blackpool and tells me that the town is known as a “safe haven for nonces”.

“They come out of prison and come here,” Lisa tells me. “They know they’ll get a friendly reception in a place jam packed with vulnerable children, and barely any support from social services.” It would be hard to deny that Blackpool can be a miserable place for children, particularly those in low-income families, to be raised.

But there is one thing I didn’t know about Blackpool, which I learned from listening to Inside the Gender Clinic, a podcast  about the much maligned Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. The  majority of referrals to the clinic are not, as one might assume, from the South, or from Brighton, but from Blackpool. This is surely the last place you’d expect to see so many trans-identified children. After all, the voices we so often hear on this issue in the media tend to belong to upper middle-class kids raised in liberal families.

So why might this be so?

Read here

 

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