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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

The right reverend Prelate made a very powerful intervention, in which he emphasised the vulnerability of these children. We need to relate our considerations here to some of our wider preoccupations in this Committee and our society as a whole. We live in an extremely volatile and unstable age in which predator extremists are waiting all the time to groom and recruit those who have had bad experiences and have become alienated. Do we want these children to become fodder for extremists or do we want to demonstrate to them by their own experience what we keep prattling away about as the values of our society? Believe you me, central to the problem that I have just described is what is seen as hypocrisy. If people see a society that talks about its values in one context but totally fails to apply them in their personal experience, we are asking for trouble and, I dare say, we almost deserve it. This argument also has to be taken seriously in that sense simply because of children’s vulnerability.