Vile predators focusing on kids warned by minister – ‘We’re coming for you’
Safeguarding Minister Natalie Fleet said the Government would be relentless in bringing grooming gangs to justice – and vile abusers would be rooted out wherever they are
Natalie Fleet, the new Safeguarding Minister, said the Government would be relentless in bringing grooming gangs who preyed on young girls to justice. (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Predators targeting children have been warned “we’re coming for you” as a top minister vowed to deliver justice to victims.
Natalie Fleet, the new Safeguarding Minister, said the Government would be relentless in bringing grooming gangs who preyed on young girls to justice. And she said vile abusers would be rooted out wherever they are – online, in schools, in sports clubs and in families.
Ms Fleet, who took over the role after Jess Phillips resigned earlier this month, has spoken about how she became pregnant at 15 after she was groomed by an older man.
In her first intervention since taking on the role, she said: “For years, vulnerable girls were groomed, drugged, beaten, raped and passed around by gangs of men.
“Too often, they were not believed. In towns like Rotherham, Oldham and Rochdale, they were failed. By adults. By agencies. By police. By systems that should have protected them.
“That is a stain on our country. The truth can be hard to read. It’s even harder to live. Child sexual abuse and exploitation can scar people for life.
“For years, I carried shame. People called me horrible names. Said I had asked for it. They didn’t believe me because of who I was and where I came from.
“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.
“We must stop at nothing to protect children from these horrors. And we must deliver justice for victims and survivors who have been denied it for too long.”
Ms Fleet said she was determined to go beyond grooming gangs to root out abuse in the darkest corners of the internet as well as closer to home.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood recently announced a £100million drive to tackle the grooming gangs scandal, with extra funding for police to probe historic cases. More than 1,200 cases that had been dropped have been referred to detectives on Operation Beaconport to review lines of inquiry that weren’t followed up and to speak to victims whose accounts had been ignored.
The police investigation is running alongside the national public inquiry, chaired by former children’s commissioner Anne Longfield. Keir Starmer initially resisted calls to launch a full national investigation into grooming gangs – as the Government argued it had been looked as part of a seven-year probe into child sexual abuse by Professor Alexis Jay, which reported in 2022.
But the PM changed course after a harrowing review by Dame Louise Casey laid bare the catalogue of failures spanning decades, which meant victims were repeatedly let down. Young girls were treated as “wayward teens” and even criminalised while their abusers walked free, she said.
Baroness Longfield’s inquiry will confront horrendous failings by institutions, including the police, local authorities, health services, social care services and schools, to tackle abuse of young girls in English towns. An independent inquiry in Telford – set up after the Sunday Mirror revealed shocking abuse of young girls by gangs – said more than 1,000 children had been sexually exploited over decades.
The three-year probe will also examine the role of ethnicity, religion and culture in how perpetrators operated.
“This is one of the biggest scandals in our country of our time,” she told the Commons Home Affairs Committee last week.
“And it’s gone on for three decades. We all want the end of it. And anyone who can actually help that process, I think, has not only a legal duty but a moral duty to that.”
