The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal rocked Britain. This was exploitation that had gone unchallenged from the late 1980s until a prosecution in 2010 of five British Pakistani men opened the floodgates. The accused were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged between 12 and 16 but the men in the dock were not the ringleaders, who miraculously avoided prosecution. Risky behaviour was first documented when social workers in care homes noticed that some of the children in their care were being picked up by taxi drivers. From 2001 onwards there were memos and reports passed between police and social services alleging abuse and naming alleged perpetrators, a number of whom were from the same family, but nothing was done. The 2010 prosecution would have seemed like a single isolated case to many on the outside but in 2011, Andrew Norfolk of The Times wrote an electrifying piece reporting that abuse in the town was widespread and that the police had known about it for 10 years. A trial then took place in 2012 in which it transpired that a child sex abuse ring was also operating in neighbouring Rochdale. Alarm bells were ringing in many towns and cities and it prompted the Home Affairs Committee in Parliament to hold hearings which led to the creation of an independent inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay, a distinguished sociologist.
The Jay Report was published in 2014 and concluded that at least 1,400 children, most of them white girls aged 11–15, had been sexually abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013 by predominantly British Pakistani men. Taxi drivers had indeed been picking the girls up from care homes and schools and using them for sex; sometimes the children were passed around men running takeaway outlets. The abuse was horrendous – gang rape, forcing the children to watch the rape of others, dousing them with petrol and threatening to set them alight, threatening to rape their mothers and sisters and to traffic them to other towns or cities. From time to time the girls would get pregnant so there were abortions, miscarriages and babies taken from their child-mothers causing terrible trauma. Many of the girls were barely adolescent.
The failure to address the abuse was a toxic combination of race, class and gender. Police and council decision-makers were utterly contemptuous of these working-class girls. They were mere children who had no sense of their own self-worth, who had disturbed and problem backgrounds, but they were being treated as ‘white trash’ by people whose sexism was only matched by their desire to watch their own backs. The police were afraid that the ethnicity of the perpetrators would lead to their being accused of racism and they would have to handle the fallout in poisoned community relations. The Labour-led council to its eternal shame did not want to make waves among the town’s ethnic community leaders because it relied too heavily on their votes.
Rotherham Council’s chief executive, its director of social services and the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire all resigned. Dame Louise Casey was asked to inspect Rotherham Council and when she reported in 2015 she concluded that the council had a bullying sexist culture of covering up information and silencing ‘whistleblowers’. In February 2015 the government replaced the council’s elected officers with a team of five commissioners. Further prosecutions took place in 2016 and 2017 and 19 men and two women were also convicted of sexual offences dating back to the late eighties. A ring-leader was jailed for 35 years.
One of the women was a radio operator at a minicab firm. She and the other female accused were convicted of false imprisonment and conspiracy to procure prostitutes, having befriended the girls, listened to their problems, given them alcohol and then insisted they repaid their debt by providing the men with sex.
The complicity of the police was plain in the trial when evidence was given that a young victim was in a car with an abuser when a police vehicle approached and asked what was going on. The abuser replied, ‘She’s just sucking my cock, mate’, and the police left. No doubt it caused hilarity down at the station as well as at the minicab office.
One victim who had been groomed from the age of 12 and was raped for the first time when she was 13 told Radio 4’s Today programme her harrowing story. She said she was raped once a week, every week, until she was 15. That police ‘lost’ clothing she had given them as evidence and that she had feared for her family’s safety.
The attitude of the men involved was displayed when one was interviewed before he was charged. He blamed the victims, saying that the problem was that ‘these days these young girls are dressed up, that is miniskirts, stuff like that; they’re going into the clubs and ending up going with blokes and they’re waking up next morning and scream rape. Or groomed.’ He blamed social services for having let the girls out in the first place.
The systemic failures of police and councils were repeated all over the country. Rotherham opened the door to a flood of investigations which might otherwise never have taken place.
Oxfordshire County Council failed to stop a grooming gang that plied girls, some as young as 11, with alcohol and drugs. The men beat and raped the girls and sold them for sex. A court heard that the men had acted ‘under the noses’ of the authorities who showed ‘almost wilful blindness’. Seven men were convicted and sentenced to a total of 95 years in June 2013 for offences including rape, facilitating child prostitution and trafficking.
In Derby nine men were convicted over three trials of systematically grooming and sexually abusing teenage girls in 2010. Many of the victims were given alcohol or drugs before being forced to have sex in cars, rented houses and hotels across the Midlands. CCTV footage had the men driving round Derby stopping girls on the street.
The case in Rochdale involved a sex ring of nine men who were given sentences ranging from four to 19 years after being found guilty of conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child. The men, from Rochdale and Oldham, were found to have exploited girls as young as 13.
Seven men were jailed in Telford after a series of court cases relating to a child prostitution ring. The charges included rape, trafficking and prostitution, sometimes involving girls as young as 12. According to West Mercia Police the group had targeted more than 100 girls between 2007 and 2009.
In 2014 and 2015, 10 men were brought to trial at Peterborough Crown Court for committing sexual offences against underage girls, some as young as 12. They were found guilty of rape, child prostitution and trafficking for sexual exploitation. The men were of Pakistani, Iraqi Kurdish, Czech and Slovak Roma heritage.
In September of 2017 a grooming gang was investigated and jailed for sexually abusing vulnerable girls in Newcastle after plying them with drink and drugs, including mephedrone. There were estimated to be 780 victims.
The scale and nature of this abuse, and the systemic failure to investigate and support the victims, reflects a complex set of competing prejudices in our society. Black men and men from other minorities often face prejudice in their dealings with the authorities from the police to many other state institutions as well as potential employers. The racism within our society is regularly exposed. Since the Macpherson Inquiry in 1999 into the death of Stephen Lawrence, the police have been regularly challenged about the embedded attitudes which inform their decisions as to stop and search, their approach to investigation and to arrest. The issue of race is now so much higher on the policing radar and this undoubtedly weighed with the police in the choices they made in the Rotherham case and others. But would the police have stepped back from investigating organised robberies by men from ethnic minority backgrounds if allegations were brought to them? Would they have been so sensitive to racism if the allegations were of organised drug trafficking? Their negative sexist attitudes about the girls, the kind of girls who went with minority men, outweighed issues of racism.
The critique by many on the right that the failure in policing was about political correctness has to be challenged. The capture of language is one of the ways in which those with power maintain their supremacy. So too is the refusal to adapt language. Political correctness came into being to make people think before they made racist or sexist utterances. The term PC is now being used as a slur to permit bigoted and hateful views. How dare you take away from me my right to say what I want about blacks and lesbians, Muslims and slags?
It is important to acknowledge that the use of girls for sex is commonplace. Thousands of girls in the UK are subjected to sexual exploitation by male-run gangs. Youth and community workers increasingly see girls and young women passed around different male gang members for sex, with rape used as a weapon in conflicts between rival gangs and in initiation ceremonies. The gangs are sometimes white; sometimes black; sometimes youth gangs and sometimes organised crime syndicates. In their desire for approval and acceptance, the girls themselves become complicit and have been known to set up friends for rape. Edward Boyd of the Centre for Social Justice conducted research with XLP, a charity working to create positive futures for young people, and their report said that society is often oblivious to the ‘desperate plight of girls embroiled in gangs. They live in a parallel world where rape, carrying drugs and guns is seen as normal.’ And it starts when girls are very young, mostly because there were problems in their home life. The report estimated that 12,500 girls and young women could be involved in gangs. One girl described being drawn in because she had no one to depend on. Her mother was a drug addict and she was on her own. She explained that she initially associated with gang members to be protected. Another described wanting to be accepted and gang members feeding on that need. She too spoke of home problems, running away and being out by herself, ‘hooking up with a load of older people’ who abused her.
The Foundation 4 Life is a charity which works with girls in gangs; many of those involved are ex-gang members themselves. One of the workers, Isha Nembhard, says that social pressure and the increasing sexualisation of young women has changed the nature and severity of a problem that was always there. The girls are used by male gang members to carry guns and knives and to hide drugs or weapons, or take drugs to customers because they attract less police interest. They are also used to bring drugs and phones into prisons. They can be paid well but are also expected to supply sex readily. The girls often become drug-dependent or suffer other mental health problems. Again, it cannot be emphasised enough that a person is a child under our law until they are 18, although a girl can consent to sex at 16.
The double standards experienced by women in the courts are also prevalent in the youth justice system. The remit of the youth courts goes beyond that of adult courts because it is concerned with the well-being of children and young people. This means that sanctions can be brought into operation for behaviour that is not technically criminal but likely to affect a young person’s development. Children can be taken there for truanting, for being neglected or in ‘moral danger’ or beyond parental control. Many girls are thus brought into the system for non-criminal offences or trivial misdemeanours when they are not conforming to notions of proper behaviour. Girls are often referred to the youth courts for different reasons than are boys, and are dealt with differently. A son’s overnight absence will earn him a knowing wink, and drunkenness will be seen as a natural part of his growing up – boys will be boys – but ‘ladette’ behaviour by a girl calls down other responses. There is a clear preoccupation with the sexuality of teenage girls and an overemphatic concern with their moral welfare. If she fails to come home on time, hangs around the wrong part of town or adopts dubious friends, a girl is far more likely to be declared in moral danger, for which, at the instigation of her parents, school, social worker or the police, she may be taken into the care of the local authority. The same behaviour in boys does not evoke the same response from the courts. These young women start off in the penal system having committed no crime at all, but once it is on their record that they have been locked up, a cycle of imprisonment begins, and offending often follows.
Girls who have been sexually abused within the family are frequently rejected, even by their mothers, when they make the abuse public. They often absent themselves from school, run away, go on the streets and end up in care. They feel such self-loathing and lack of worth that abuse by other men follows or they prostitute themselves to survive. The police are now required to involve social services and avoid criminalising the girl if she is underage. But it is not uncommon to hear the police complain that for some of the 16- and 17-year-olds it is a lifestyle choice and instead of being prosecuted for offences they are getting away with it. But young women who are on the game rarely have a happy story to tell about their home life. Girls who need to be taken into custody – because they have committed violent offences – should be placed in the secure units run by local authorities but there are few places, and custody orders are often made where there is no violence at all, just repetition of offending. Girls who are arrested and have nowhere to go still sometimes end up in adult prisons, despite proof that it is damaging to lock up the young with people who are older.
The story of our young and the criminal justice system is not comforting. Young people between the ages of 16 and 24 years old are more likely than any other age group to be the victims of crime according to the ‘Bromley Briefings’ published by the Prison Reform Trust in 2013, and many of those who are the victims of crime are the very ones being locked up in prisons. In August of that same year, there were 1,229 children in custody: 736 were white and 468 were BAME; 50 were girls.
Seventy-six per cent of children in custody or care have an absent father, 33% an absent mother and 39% have been on the child protection register or have experienced neglect or abuse. One in eight children in custody or care have experienced the death of a parent or sibling. Although less than 1% of all children in England are in care, looked-after children make up 33% of boys in custody and 61% of girls.
One in 10 girls in custody have been paid for sex according to research by the Prison Reform Trust. Almost half of them were 14 or younger when last in education and 60% arrive in custody with a drug problem. The numbers who have been sexually abused or brought up in households where there was domestic violence are very high. Fifty-three per cent of adult women in prison have experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse in their childhood. Thirty-five per cent of girls between the ages of 13 and 18 in custody have been identified with depression and 19% have post-traumatic stress disorder.
According to research by Ewan Kennedy for HM Inspectorate of Prisons in 2013, young girls not only felt isolated from friends or family when incarcerated but they had no one in prison to turn to for support. A large percentage of girls felt unsafe and were victimised while in custody both by other prisoners and by staff. Thirty per cent of children in custody were held over 50 miles away from their homes, including 10% held over 100 miles away. Forty-two per cent of girls experienced trouble with sending and receiving mail and only 19% of girls said it was easy for their family to visit. As a result of these revelations, later in 2013 it was decided to stop imprisoning girls in actual jails. All girls under 18 are now detained in secure training centres or secure children’s homes but the same sense of insecurity and fear persists. The secure children’s homes are run by local authorities scattered around the country so research into the girls’ experiences is harder to undertake. What is clear is that girls in care suffer high levels of stress, anxiety and depression, and often go on to petty crime and prostitution. Half of the secure children’s homes have now been decommissioned which means that children are being held further and further away from home or from people who might care about them. They are also under-resourced and understaffed. We are just transporting the victims of one type of abuse or neglect into another environment of abuse and neglect.
But it is not just girls with backgrounds of abuse or very troubled families who suffer mental health problems. According to a major study published in September 2017 and conducted by University College London, one in four teenage girls believe they are suffering from depression. The research tracked 10,000 teenagers and found widespread emotional problems with misery, loneliness and self-hate rife. Parents were more likely to pick up signs with sons because they were more likely to display behavioural problems like fighting and rebellion compared with girls. Why are girls suffering in this way?
Children are not born aware of skin colour or gender but all too soon our world invades that innocence. Black children have a moment that brings awareness of racism into their lives; sociologists call it the ‘encounter’. It is an occasion where they are subjected to abuse or differential treatment or see racism happen to a parent, and it is like a tremor that shifts the earth’s tectonic plates. Afua Hirsch, the mixed-race journalist and author, describes minor feelings of otherness as a child in her book Brit(ish), but the full force only hit her when as a girl in her early teens she entered a small boutique in Wimbledon where she lived and was followed around the shop; she realised her blackness made her an automatic suspect for shoplifting. She says that to this day she always makes a conscious display of her hands when in shops and does it routinely despite her success and privilege. The world immediately changes in a significant way when people become aware of racism; their own ways of seeing and feeling are changed.
Something similar happens to girls of all races, though. Ideas of what it means to be a girl or boy surround children and imbue deep attitudes that are hard to uproot. Boys learn a sense of entitlement about their wants and needs from an early age. However, growing up for a girl is about learning to be afraid of what can happen. You come to know you inhabit a body that is vulnerable. You learn that if you allow something to happen you will be punished. Women discover by watching and listening that when something like sexual assault happens it is their fault.
Girls also feel huge pressure from ever earlier ages to conform to commercially driven ideas of attractiveness and size. The most recent work of the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, concerning the human body, has revealed that girls as young as six talk about dieting. The compulsion to be model-thin has led to an epidemic of eating disorders among girls, and the toll on female self-confidence caused by the barrage of media images extolling the only acceptable body type is immeasurable. But pressures to be the right kind of desirable woman take other forms. Girls are coerced into providing sexual favours at ever earlier ages. Getting down on their knees to boys is for many girls their initiation into sexual intimacy. Teachers describe the constant sharing of pornographic imagery on mobile phones and the shoving of it under the noses of the less worldly in the classroom to shock them and then mock them. Pictures of bestiality, the penetration of multiple orifices, gang sex – the full panoply of extreme imagery is so readily available.
Sexting produces particular anxieties. Sexting can be a kind of foreplay but it more often descends into coarse descriptions of what people want to do to each other, pornographic rather than erotic. What people do not recognise is that once sent they are no longer in control of what happens to the messages or the attached photos. It is illegal, however, to post sexual images online of people under the age of 18 – an important threat teachers and other adults can use when insisting that pictures on the phones of pupils are deleted.
Cyberbullying is not against the law but harassment or threatening behaviour is. If someone keeps making someone feel scared online and they are doing so intentionally, what they are doing could be illegal. The important thing for someone being bullied online to do is to keep a record of when something occurred and what happened and to seek help from a trusted adult.
Online bullying is now a serious problem for the young with hateful comments and messages being posted that are then shared and endorsed by others with a ‘like’. Rumours are spread on Twitter which reach hundreds. Trolling has become a new form of playground bullying with the constant posting of derogatory comments or doctored images and other gross abuse. Trolls incite others to join in what is described as virtual mobbing. A girl with Down’s syndrome and her mother experienced trolls photoshopping their images onto pornography and then posting them on Facebook. It was reported in 2016 that one in four teenagers had suffered abuse online over their sexual orientation, race, religion, gender or disability. The Internet should not be an anonymous place where people can post abuse without any consequence, but while the Crown Prosecution Service has created new guidelines saying it will prosecute, few recorded cases have followed because of the evidential difficulty in identifying perpetrators. This aspect of modern life is posing serious problems for law enforcement. Freedom of speech means that simply putting up postings that are nasty or offend is insufficient for prosecution.
A new law was introduced in April 2015 to deal with revenge porn – the situation where someone maliciously shares sexually explicit pictures of former partners. In the first year there were 1,160 reported incidents including a victim as young as 11. There were 200 actual prosecutions. Scotland passed similar legislation in 2017. Threats to publish material is also part of the coercive control that is now a crime. The new technology which turns our phones into tracking devices is now being used by abusive men.
The misery and self-loathing induced when someone is humiliated or when the pack turns on a vulnerable person has led to increased suicides and an epidemic of self-harming. Self-harm is more prevalent among girls than people imagine, with gay, lesbian and bisexual people all figuring high in research. Prisoners, asylum seekers and veterans of the armed forces all have a high incidence of self-harming, and 96% of transgender youth self-harm. When people self-harm – cutting themselves, taking overdoses – they are almost always struggling with intolerable distress or unbearable situations and sometimes it is because they have experienced bullying, pressure to conform, physical or sexual abuse. Inflicting physical pain is a way of releasing the mental pain and tension. It can also be about punishing yourself. Care homes and prisons are full of women and girls who injure or mutilate themselves. But so too are our schools, universities and colleges. Self-harm is not by any means confined to women but boys are more inclined to externalise their emotional distress.
None of it points to a world that is a woman’s oyster.
And for girls from some cultural backgrounds, that world is even more distant. The horrifying tradition of female genital mutilation is euphemistically called female circumcision to put it on a par with male circumcision because that is a practice widely accepted and without the same assault on a person’s sexuality. FGM involves slicing into the genitalia of girls and frequently the removal of the clitoris. It can lead to haemorrhaging, chronic pain, bladder and menstrual problems as well as psychological harm. It is usually performed by community women on little girls when they are between the ages of seven and twelve, often without anaesthetic and using a razor blade. I have visited health education programmes in Ethiopia and have met with women who perform these ritual incisions; I have also spoken with many women who have gone through the ordeal as well as male leaders who still think it is a cultural practice which is good for women and for their society because it stops promiscuity, helps preserve virginity until marriage and makes women more passive. They actually say that is one of its purposes. Little girls become more subdued and less boisterous and troublesome.
I remember in 1997 going to a hospital in north London at the invitation of a consultant obstetrician who was concerned about the prevalence of the problem and the failure of current policy to prevent it. Women would arrive at the clinic expecting their first child and he would find they had had their labia removed and the vagina stitched so that the opening was a tiny aperture through which she would never be able to push a baby. Women would have to be told that at the time of birth they would need an episiotomy to cut an opening wide enough for the baby to emerge and that afterwards their vagina would be repaired, but not closed up as it had been before as to do so would be contrary to British law. The women would listen intently as it was explained that it was not healthy to have a closed vagina. They often gave histories of painful periods and excruciating intercourse, as well as urinary tract and other infections. They would cry as they spoke of unsatisfactory sex lives and the pain of penetration. Sadly, after a healthy birth and delivery and a vagina returned as near as possible to normal, the women would invariably come back to the hospital for their second birth with their vagina reinfibulated. The doctors at the clinic knew that these operations were being performed in the community by elderly women or that the women had had it done back in the country from which they had originally come. They were persuaded that their husbands would not want them with open vaginas. British-born girls with family origins in numerous West African countries, as well as Egypt and the MENA region, now speak out about the practice and describe being taken out of school for a holiday and having the practice performed back in their parents’ villages. Although there has been legislation in the UK for 27 years there have been few prosecutions. The law was extended in 2003 because there had been until then no prosecutions whatsoever. The new law made it an offence to enable such a practice to be performed on another, so that family members who arrange for it to be done can be prosecuted too.
An asylum case conducted by my own chambers was the 2006 case of Fornah, involving a woman who had fled Sierra Leone during the civil war there. She was just 15 when her father rushed the family back to his own village from the city seeking sanctuary from the conflict. She had overheard elders expressing horror that she was uncircumcised and talking about subjecting her to FGM. She ran away but was captured by rebel forces, raped repeatedly by their leader and became pregnant. She managed to escape and came to the UK to an uncle’s family. Her attempt to obtain refugee status on the basis that to be returned put her at risk of FGM was opposed by the British government, and even the Court of Appeal turned down her application on the basis that FGM was not discriminatory as it did not set aside from the rest of society those who were subjected to it. Most women in Sierra Leone underwent the procedure and indeed most women accepted it as a cultural practice. It was not a defining characteristic of the particular group, namely women. A group could not be defined by the kind of persecution to which they might be subjected, said the majority on the court. One judge dissented – Lady Justice Mary Arden.
The Supreme Court overturned that decision and I have no doubt that Baroness Brenda Hale played an important role in the discourse which preceded the ruling. Lord Bingham, who led the court, made remarks of far-reaching significance. He said that the women of Sierra Leone did share a common characteristic, which without fundamental change in the social mores is immutable, namely a position of social inferiority compared with men. And it was true of all women, whether those who accepted their socially inferior position or those who did not. He pointed out that FGM is an extreme and very cruel expression of male dominance. The court agreed.
The decision has been followed by many other cases involving the nature of the culture in countries from which women are fleeing and seeking asylum: Liberia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, Ivory Coast. It has now been used as an authority in non-FGM actions – where the culture embeds the social inferiority of women.
The case is an example of why we need women in our higher courts in significant numbers. It is about changing the nature of judicial discourse. Lady Justice Arden’s minority judgment in Fornah laid the ground for the debate in our highest court where Baroness Hale, in partnership with enlightened men, was able to create a vitally important precedent which is having ramifications around the world. This is how the law changes and how larger shifts in legal thinking come to pass. A diverse judiciary means different perspectives are brought into the courtrooms and the law is enriched by that broader experience.
However, there is still a very long way to go. For example, three cases referred to the Crown Prosecution Service in the last seven years were not pursued because there were evidential problems. One case against a young doctor failed because there was no evidence that he was performing FGM deliberately; he was not of a culture that followed such practices and through inexperience and lack of supervision stitched the woman along her original scar seam. In that same trial the husband of the woman was also in the dock for complicity but was also acquitted.
In November 2017 a man was charged in Bristol with two offences contrary to section 1 of the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 alleging that he excised, infibulated or otherwise mutilated the whole or part of the labia minora of a girl. He was also charged with alternative offences of wounding the child and three separate counts of child cruelty. The alleged offences took place between five and seven years ago. Again the case failed because it transpired that the prosecution arose after he was deliberately engaged in conversation about FGM by a passenger in his minicab who was an anti-FGM activist. It was claimed he had admitted having his daughter cut. However, examination of the girl did not in the end support the allegations. Finally a landmark conviction was secured in February 2019 and the mother of a three-year-old girl was sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment on 8 March for subjecting her child to FGM. The length of the sentence was clearly intended to highlight the egregious nature of the crime.
The problem with FGM prosecutions is that those who perform such operations are almost invariably not qualified medical professionals but people in the community here or back in Africa who have become practised in doing it. Unsurprisingly, girls do not want to testify against their parents or other family members, and although people whisper the names of those who perform such operations on kitchen tables, they aren’t prepared to give evidence. It is estimated that 100–140 million women worldwide are living with the consequences of FGM, which is tantamount to torture. Many new African constitutions such as that of Somalia prohibit the practice. It is said that as many as 24,000 girls under 15 in the UK are at risk of FGM. This will be an estimate based on ethnicity and the fear that unless adequately challenged girls of identified communities will be forced to undergo the procedure. I have spent time in Ethiopia working on health and human rights projects addressing the issue. It is still strongly linked to ideas of chastity and marriage and also to child marriage arrangements, where families betroth or marry off very young girls, who may even be prepubescent. In most countries child marriage is now contrary to law and it is recognised that early marriage and pregnancy lead to serious health hazards and mortality for babies and child-mothers. However, the persistence of customary practice is the problem. A chaste woman is of high value both in practical and moral terms. The best advocates against FGM are the courageous young women of Somalian, Kenyan and Ethiopian background who are leading campaigns to end the practice. What is also needed is the clear direction from imams and priests that myths about the practice being religiously required are totally untrue as many believe it is sanctioned by their holy books.
Proper sex education in schools is one of the ways to engage the young in discussions about relationships and mutual respect, about sexual activity and consent, and it should start early. At the moment personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE) is not a statutory part of the curriculum in the UK, although schools are expected to provide it. In 2017 the Department for Education announced that relationships and sex education (RSE) would be compulsory in all secondary schools but as yet the content cannot be agreed. The usual religious concerns will be urged upon ministers and the right to remove young people from classes will be preserved. Those who get withdrawn are often the most vulnerable and the least likely to get good information from their parents. Schools need to have professional sexual health experts come into the classroom and provide regular advice on what a healthy sexual relationship looks like; consent workshops are needed and misogynistic ideas around women’s bodies and about relationships should be challenged. Work also has to be done on the stereotyping of what men and women are supposed to be and do, which feeds homophobia and transphobia. It is unfair to expect regular teachers to talk about sexual pleasure and mutuality in sex. That is invariably cringeworthy and ripe for taking apart by embarrassed pupils. There are now great vlogs on sex education available on YouTube which the young are using to get the information they do not get elsewhere, but if you are only getting your sex education from videos you might not be getting a rounded view of what good sex is like and what values you might want to bring to your choices. Some aspects of sex education are already compulsory and are taught in science like an anatomy lesson. The last time guidance on sex education was updated was in 2000. It really is time that the UK recognised the full import of good sex education in creating awareness and confidence as well as ultimately changing a culture in which sexual predation thrives.
And nowhere, perhaps, is that sexual predation more in evidence than in the rise of modern-day slavery. It is one of the shocking consequences of globalisation and has become a fact of life in the UK in ways that we would never have imagined only a decade or two ago. Child exploitation, child labour and the sale of children for sex were things that happened elsewhere, or so people thought. The true scale of trafficking is still difficult to assess but more than 5,000 potential victims of trafficking and modern slavery were reported to UK authorities in 2017, the highest on record so far. More than a third of all potential victims of trafficking are children under the age of 18. Many of those children are actually British child-citizens, sometimes runaways, used as drug mules by criminal gangs to take drugs from one place to another for potential buyers. Girls are most often utilised, as the assumption is that they draw down less police attention. They are also exploited for sexual purposes by gang members and the criminals who are involved in these forms of exploitation also operate online, particularly on adult services websites, where they promote their illicit ‘wares’. Almost half of the cases reported – 41% – involved the possible exploitation of a child aged under 18. These figures come from the National Referral Mechanism, the system for identifying victims of trafficking.
London is a prime destination for human traffickers. Reports in November 2016 from a child trafficking NGO Ecpat UK and the charity Missing People found that significant numbers of children go missing from local authority care and gravitate to central London, where they are picked up by traffickers and moved around the country. Other children arrive, ostensibly unaccompanied, at ports of entry, stations and airports, but in fact they have been brought in by traffickers. The traffickers know the children will be taken into the care of local authorities but they have such a hold on them that before long the children are spirited away from foster parents or care homes into the dark underworld of domestic servitude, nailbars, cannabis cultivation and sexual servicing. The NGOs found that 167 of the 590 children suspected or identified as child trafficking victims in the year from September 2014 to 2015 vanished from care. An additional 593 of the 4,744 unaccompanied children placed under the protection of local authorities also went missing at least once in the same period. Of the 760 children who have disappeared, 207 have never been found. It is believed that this data is only the tip of the iceberg as many local authorities have not responded to researchers.
British children and EU nationals are dealt with by the National Crime Agency’s modern slavery human trafficking unit, while non-EU cases are dealt with by the Home Office. Many professionals suspect that there is bias against recognising people as victims of trafficking if they are from countries where their right to residency in the UK is not pre-established. There is a belief that in a department which had a policy of creating a hostile environment on immigration matters and a culture of scepticism, there is a failure to see trafficking where it exists. A new expert body has been created in the Home Office but in fact the most effective way to build a firewall between victim identification and immigration concerns would be to move the process out of the Home Office altogether.
Investigating these cases is very hard as the whole system relies on high levels of fear and threat. The young are too frightened to testify and are terrified for the safety of their family. The worst traffickers move readily across borders and Europol, Eurojust, and the EAW are all crucial in bringing them to justice. Yet here we are, putting in jeopardy these collaborative and effective ways of dealing with cross-border crime by exiting the European Union. The only way to deal with trafficking is to do it in partnership with other nations, especially our closest neighbours.