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Safeguarding Children (Sexual Exploitation)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), who has enormous expertise in this area and has campaigned on it for many years. It is unfortunate that there are not more hon. Members here today, because this important subject affects all our constituencies. I know that there are trafficked women in Worthing in my constituency, and the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) admitted that there are some in Dorset. Exploitation happens everywhere, and often in the most unexpected places. I welcome the Minister, who is new to the children's brief. This is an example of where joined-up thinking and action under the remit of the Department for Children, Schools and Families is absolutely key. It needs to work with all kinds of other agencies and colleagues at the Home Office and elsewhere to bring joined-up solutions to this ongoing and, perhaps, worsening problem. My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes gave a comprehensive tour d'horizon of sexual exploitation of children in all kinds of areas, ending with trafficking, on which he has expertise. I recognise some of the domestic problems in broken families to which he alluded. The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole mentioned the generational effect: children who have been sexually abused go on to have children who may suffer the same fate. That kind of vicious circle often exists. The very alarming figures that my hon. Friend gave—that one in six children will experience sexual abuse—provide a serious wake-up call to everyone in our country. A third of all rapes are of children under the age of 16. We often demonise children as being responsible for crime, but we forget that they are the major victims of so much crime—rape being one of the more horrendous ones. My hon. Friend made a good comparison when he described the trafficking of children as being the new slave trade. He also made a good point about children being victims: they should not be criminalised for being forced into prostitution at sensitive young ages. We need better awareness and more specialist training—particularly among some of our professional staff, such as social workers. The General Social Care Council has made recommendations about how better to train social workers who work in child protection. Such social workers work with children at risk from sexual exploitation or from being trafficked and ending up in sexual exploitation in this country, as well as with those who are subject to child abuse. My hon. Friend will know—because his wife was part of the commission on social workers, which I chaired on behalf of the Conservative party—that we have produced two reports since 2007, in which we discuss the need to make sure that we have a properly trained, motivated, reinvigorated and resourced social worker work force. Social workers work in very difficult, challenging and depressing areas—my hon. Friend has touched on several of those—and it is important that the responsibilities in relation to those are joined up. After baby P, we have head a lot about child abuse at the hands of parents or carers. The figures are alarming: perhaps upwards of three children a week die as a result of abuse or neglect in the home. In addition, 389 young people have gone missing from care since 2000, which is probably a woeful underestimate of the actual figure. My hon. Friend referred to some cases in relation to that. I shall refer to three areas: first, child abuse; secondly, abuse using the internet—what has been referred to as networked paedophiles; and thirdly, the subject of trafficking, which formed the major thrust of my hon. Friend's comments. We have heard the ghastly figures about child abuse and killings, but we need to appreciate that not enough people have been prosecuted: too many people have proceedings taken against them, but get off. Let us consider some of the figures on the sexual assault of a male child aged under 13. In 2004, only 19 cases were brought under that charge, of which only four people were found guilty. That is a woefully low conviction rate. Those figures had improved. For example, in 2007, the figure had gone up to 81 cases proceeded with, among which half—41—had a verdict of guilty. In 2004, 45 proceedings were brought for rape or attempted rape of a child aged under 13, with only three successful convictions. Again, those figures have gone up—in 2007, the number was 142. We are getting better at detecting some such cases—perhaps because more people have come forward to report such crimes, which is progress—but still only 69 were found guilty, which is just over a third. The figures are similar for sexual assault of a female child aged under 13: back in 2004, proceedings were brought against 128 people, but only 29 were convicted. That figure had risen to 448 proceedings, of which 246 ended in a conviction—rather better progress. Too many people are carrying on such activities under the radar and are not being detected. When they are detected, it is difficult to make charges stick. Too many of the perpetrators of such crimes are still on the loose and getting away with it—whether it be the abuse or, ultimately, the death of a child. There were serious flaws in the law about joint enterprise, although I am glad to say that the Government addressed them some years ago after a lot of campaigning by many hon. Members on both sides. As a result, both parents can now be prosecuted under the law on joint enterprise when it cannot be proved which parent struck the fatal blow. We have a long way to go to ensure that people are brought to justice and receive appropriate justice for the severity of their crimes. The second issue that I want to touch on is that of sexual images on the internet and the obvious exploitation that that inevitably involves—every image that ends up on the internet does so because a child has been exploited somewhere down the line, somewhere in a foreign country, in some hidden room. A while ago, I spent a depressing afternoon in the specialist unit at Scotland Yard, speaking to those whose highly depressing job it is to go through literally millions of images and films on seized hard drives. What struck me was how ingenious those who view the images are. Jim Gamble, the chief executive of the child exploitation and online protection centre, has referred to them as networked paedophiles. They are enormously clever at being one step ahead of the authorities. They use technology ingeniously to carry on their sinister activities of swapping, accessing and subscribing to images of very young children and babies in highly distressing situations. They do that as if they were swapping cigarette cards or souvenirs. The lengths to which some people will go to secure such ghastly images, which represent the exploitation of young, vulnerable children at its worst, are extraordinary. I have concerns about funding, which my hon. Friend also mentioned. It has been reported that thousands of cases of children who are portrayed in pornographic pictures and are at risk of abuse are not being investigated properly because of a cash crisis. CEOP is hailed as one of the leading child protection agencies in the world, but despite its excellent work, it faces something of a funding crisis. It had a three-year funding arrangement with Visa and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which are to be congratulated on their support, and the Home Office has also contributed some money. None the less, the work load is so enormous that the funds are just not sufficient. When I visited my sexual offences unit in Sussex, I was told that there was a limit on its funding. The unit needs a lot of resources just to get the appropriate equipment—as I said, the people involved in these crimes are very clever at hiding images. Then, however, it needs people who are properly trained and able to cope with that equipment. The important point is that we will never prevent indecent images from being posted on the internet. One of the downsides of the internet is that we cannot closely regulate what happens on it. As we know, things can happen well beyond the geographical boundaries of the United Kingdom. The challenge is to cut off the tentacles, like those of an octopus, and to make it as difficult as possible for people to put images on the internet, to profit from them and to access them. That is why the European Financial Coalition has been important. The EFC is an assembly of various firms—particularly those involved in finance—including MasterCard, Microsoft, PayPal, Visa Europe, and Allen and Overy. Using those various financial firms, CEOP can cut off some of the tentacles and make it more difficult for the money to flow where people are trying to gain commercial advantage from exploiting images. Things have improved. As Jim Gamble has said,""Things have changed radically since the days of Operation Ore. Individual organisations, members of the financial sector and law enforcement agencies have worked hard to undermine the activities of those who sold images of child abuse as commodities. As a result, the organised crime element has diminished year on year as the risk increased and the profit reduced."" However, it is still going on far too much.