Bravo and God Bless, I say, to Natalie Fleet, the new Safeguarding minister, who has just announced a government crackdown on grooming gangs.
Fleet got the job after Jess Phillips resigned from the Government during the turbulent week recently, when some cabinet ministers, disillusioned with Sir Keir Starmer, chose to return to the backbenches.
Fleet herself became pregnant when she was just 15, after being groomed and used by an older man. So she has lived experience of how adult men trap and sexually use children, and what it does to the heads, hearts and bodies of victims. That is why she speaks with such urgency and passion about the need for action: “Child sexual abuse and exploitation can scar people for life. For years, I carried the shame. […] When I say victims and survivors must be heard and protected, I mean it. When I say their abusers and rapists must face justice, I mean it.”
Let me lay down some facts. Men of all backgrounds and ages rape girls, women, boys and other men. An official report in 2020 concluded that the majority of child sex abuse gangs in England, Wales and Scotland were made up of white men under 30. Yet, today, many indigenous Britons have come to believe that white girls are in serious danger only from brown Pakistani “paedos” and dark-skinned asylum seekers.
