The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary Suella Braverman will visit Rochdale today as they officially launch launch a new “grooming gang task force” and set out their plans to tackle the problem of the sexual exploitation of young women and girls.
Ahead of the visit Sunak said:
“The safety of women and girls is paramount. For too long, political correctness has stopped us from weeding out vile criminals who prey on children and young women. We will stop at nothing to stamp out these dangerous gangs.”
The visit to Rochdale has been chosen as it was the centre of one of the most severe cases of child grooming which saw Nine men who abused girls as young as 13 were convicted of sexual abuse over a two-year period.
They were convicted on the back of evidence from who were as young as 13 when the abuse happened between 2008 and 2010.
The vulnerable girls, some of them runaways or in the care of social services, were given the attention they craved before being plied with drink, raped and driven all over the north to have sex with other men.
The new task force will see specialist officers parachuted in to assist police in areas under threat from gangs
Police will be required to record ethnicity data for the first time, in a bid to stop suspects escaping justice due to cultural sensitivities; being in a grooming gang will be an aggravating factor in sentencing.
While Teachers, social workers, doctors and other professionals will have a mandatory duty to report suspected grooming.
Former North West Chief Prosecutor Nazir Afzal said
“Children are less safe than they were a decade ago but these initiatives do nothing to prevent harm”
Maggie Oliver, the former GMP detective turned whistleblower, who helped expose the Rochdale paedophile scandal said earlier this year that the police and authorities were still failing to take the matter seriously and were continuing to let victims down.
Yesterday the Home Secretary Suella Braverman caused controversy when she said that “senior politicians in Labour-run areas” failed to prevent cases of child sexual abuse because they did not want to “call out people along ethnic lines”
