Telford – Questions for RSE
from Parent Power:
“Doing more harm than good”? Sexual exploitation in English towns.
In the past few years there have been a whole series of the most disturbing cases of sexual exploitation of young girls that have made the towns where they occurred a litany of shame. Rotherham, Rochdale, now Telford. There are others. The horror is that more towns will be added to this list, in the same way that the dark side has been exposed of formerly respected institutions – the BBC for instance with its proven abusers, such as Savile, Hall and Harris. In recent weeks elite public schools based around monasteries – Ampleforth, Downside – have also been added to this list of shame, showing themselves to be utterly inadequate in the safeguarding of young people in their care. In the case of the exploited young girls, local authorities, the police and political parties running town halls have shown themselves either incapable of acting fully or in time, or are themselves so crippled by the fear of being accused of ‘racism’ that they have almost ‘handed over’ these vulnerable children, often known to social services or having been ‘in care’, to abuse gangs.
There is a repeated pattern of evidence that comes out of these tales of horror that would need a 21st Century Charles Dickens to do justice to all its aspects of corruption, cruelty and incompetence. But there is one area we can do something about – however it will require a wholesale change of mind in our official bodies. And that change of mind will come against the most entrenched vested interests that, to coin a phrase, “feed on the flesh of our children” for their survival and their profits.
That area is the fact that, as the reports cited below show, the casual acceptance of under-age sex (under-age being under 16 which still under current law is the age at which a young person is deemed able to give consent to sexual intercourse) is not only unquestioned; but, in the words of the serious case review conducted by the Newcastle Safeguarding Children Board, sexual health clinics may be ‘unwittingly assisting perpetrators to abuse without risk of pregnancies and disease’. Confidentiality policies appear to be acting as a barrier to protecting girls from sexual exploitation and inadvertently assisting their abusers. The report goes on to say ‘It emerges that it is standard practice for information to be freely shared between school nurses and sexual health services, while parents are kept in the dark, and underage sexual activity does not trigger any concerns’.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
