Every one gets involved in politics to change the world, or at least a little part of it. It may be getting a school crossing, in protest of unfair working conditions or, as in my case, frustration that the vulnerable do not have a voice in our society. We get elected with this as our motivator but very often the reality of the system and the scale of the workload means it gets put on the back burner – and often forgotten about.
Within a month of being elected as the member of parliament for Rotherham I heard about child sexual exploitation when the council was called in front of the home affairs select committee. I started out thinking maybe this was a local issue, but rapidly became aware that it was occurring across the country, impacting every community and the scale of it was enormous.
For the last three years much of my work has been campaigning to prevent this most vile of crimes. Working with the charity Barnardo’s, I ran a parliamentary inquiry which made various recommendations. Successes from the inquiry include: changing the law around grooming to make sure the police can prosecute on the first occasion a child is approached for sex – as it stood, they had to wait until the second contact; changing the training given to judges and guidance to juries; and, most significantly, getting the prime minister to hold a summit on child sexual exploitation, which resulted in the establishment of a task force to tackle the crime.
Through this work and the collaborations with charities and academics, I found out more and more about the scale of child abuse in the UK. It is truly shocking. Most recent data from NSPCC approximates that half a million children are being abused. If accurate this estimate that one in four girls, and one in eight boys have experienced inappropriate sexual advances by the time they reach adulthood is correct – I do not doubt that the NSPCC figure is accurate.
As an MP I believe I have a duty to see the bigger picture and act accordingly. I became aware that as a society we almost seem to have accepted that child abuse is inevitable. Weekly we hear of prosecutions and we demand people to resign, or look to blame the social workers and police for not doing enough. But is child abuse inevitable? What can we do to stop child abuse? More pertinently, what can I do?
With this question keeping me awake, I developed the idea of Dare2Care. The campaign hopes to start a cultural fightback to protect all children. Rather than accepting that child abuse is rife and only focusing on the crime once it has been committed, what are the interventions we can make to prevent the abuse occurring in the first place? Dare2Care looks at the moments in a child’s life when we can give them the tools to recognise and address inappropriate sexual behaviour. How can a young child know that they are being abused by a relative when the relative is telling them that it is normal and must be kept a secret? How can a young person understand about consent and boundaries when their only source of information on sex is by watching internet pornography?
The final part of the campaign is to investigate the cultural shift that I have seen in young people, in that they now see violence in their relationships as normal. From research done by academics and charities, this normalisation of violence is driven by the internet and social media. The mass proliferation of sexting, cyber-bullying and on-line grooming, when added to my earlier comments about young people finding out about relationships from watching on-line porn has created a toxic cocktail that we, as a society, simply have to address.
I do not know if the campaign will work, I do not know if it will change the world, or even a little part of it. What I do know is, I have a duty try.
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Sarah Champion MP is shadow minister for preventing abuse and domestic violence. She tweets @SarahChampionMP
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Last year I tried to make Calderdale MBC responsible for allowing sexual abuse of me by foster carers whilst I was local authority care. I took CMBC to court for compensation having complained and got not even an attempt at apology. Initially their solicitor (Simon Hills, Plexus Law) offered me £10000 outside the first court room and asked me to let the case go. I declined the ‘offer’ as it was only a verbal suggestion from Simon Hills that he could suggest the proposal to his client. The case proceeded..I cannot begin to describe the trauma. Eventually Plexus law hired Adam Weitzman, barrister, to defend my claim against CMBC (I represented myself). The social worker at the time recorded the abuse in social services files, and the decision to keep me in the place where the abuse took place. Mr. Weitzman argued that because the social worker could not be found in order to explain why I had to remain in a place of abuse was detrimental to the defense case and so it would be unfair for the judge to make a decision in my favour for compensation. The upshot is that CMBC paid solicitors and a barrister and others just shy of £50000 to defend their social services actions. I have difficulty paying my council tax for this kind of system – anyone else? Incidentally, had I been in one of their children’s homes I would not have had these issues – I would have been entitled to compensation. I’d be happy to share the full story with interested parties who have similar difficulties in getting justice. I have previously contacted a solicitor firm in Nottingham who is fighting the discrimination against children in local authority care who were farmed out into foster care but had no recourse for complaint or compensation when abuse occurred. My own experiences have left me bereft of any faith in the local authority social services departments and how we can justice must be upheld given all it takes is highly educated people to come and ‘muddy the waters’ in clear cut cases to defend what is, in effect, STATE SPONSORED RAPE!!!
STATE SPONSORED RAPE