Child Sexual Offender Data

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 730605 relating to collection and publication of child sexual offender data.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Siobhain.

Will my hon. Friend give way?

Goodness me!

Brave young constituents in Yeovil reported historical cases of sexual abuse, but workforce shortages in the police, terrible communication and other failings meant years of stress, delays and the Crown Prosecution Service ruling that it could not advance prosecution despite the evidence threshold being met. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need urgent investment to ensure that the criminal justice system can address historical cases of sexual violence and communicate clearly with victims? No young person should see justice denied.

My hon. Friend makes his case with some passion. I take note of it, and I thank him.

As Chair of the Petitions Committee, it is always encouraging to see public participation in politics, so I welcome our friends to the Public Gallery. With more than 200,000 signatures, it is quite evident that this petition has engaged a very large number of people across the country. At this point, I remind people that the person leading a debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee sets the scene, as it were, so I will refer to the petitioner and to other points of the argument.

The petition was created by the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe). Prior to this debate, he explained to me that he tabled the petition out of concern that existing non-statutory approaches to data collection and transparency regarding child sexual exploitation have been insufficient. He wants to see a clear legal duty imposed on the relevant authorities to consistently record and publish offender data regarding the nationality, ethnicity, immigration status and religion of child sexual offenders.

Furthermore, the hon. Member explained to me that he found the Government’s response to the petition insufficient, on the basis that it relies on expectations and directives rather than statutory duties. He believes that this data should not only be collected but be published and standardised to achieve full transparency and accountability.

The hon. Member refers to real people. There are no people more real than the three girls mentioned in the 2017 BBC docudrama and the whistleblowers involved. Does he accept that within days of that broadcast, which exposed to the nation the horrific actions of a Rochdale grooming gang, Andy Burnham commissioned an independent inquiry that led not just to the exposure of institutional failings but the vindication of those whistleblowers and, subsequently, the arrest and conviction of seven sick paedophiles in Rochdale, who were jailed for a total of more than 170 years? Does that not prove that we need to have real, strong political leadership on this issue, but also cross-party consensus, and that we should not be making party political points out of this? We should be working together to defeat paedophilia.

Order. I point out to Members that this is an incredibly important debate, which is why so many of you are here today. I would ask you to be brief in your interventions, out of respect for all other Members who have something to say.

Thank you, Dame Siobhain. The hon. Member underlined the point I am trying to make. Of the people watching this debate, many will alas be survivors of child sexual abuse who did not report that abuse until adulthood. That is the terrible thing. Their safety, dignity and wellbeing must remain at the centre of the debate and all that we say today.

I also want to recognise that there will be people watching this debate who have felt failed by institutions and public authorities in the past. That is precisely why we should use any parliamentary time on this topic—specifically with regard to information sharing—as a way of better equipping safeguarding agencies, local authorities, our criminal justice system and Parliament to improve the protection of children.

Unfortunately, no institution can undo past failures, but we have a responsibility to learn from them and to strengthen the systems we rely upon to improve the identification of abuse, our response to it and the experience of survivors.

Research has repeatedly shown that about half of child sexual abuse in the UK happens within the family, and the majority of the rest is by known, trusted adults. When I was chief executive of a rape crisis service, I worked very closely with an organisation called Child Abuse Prevention UK, which taught children to recognise the signs of abuse and how to report it to a trusted adult, such as a teacher. Unfortunately, it folded due to lack of funding, because the support for prevention and education in this area is absolutely non-existent—

Order. Will the Member please sit down? Please do not make me have to intervene a third time.

Thank you, Dame Siobhain. I will come to my hon. Friend’s point very shortly.

This petition provokes legitimate questions that the public want answered, regarding how data on these offences is collected and how patterns of offending are identified. When discussing this practice, it is important that we balance transparency with privacy, proportionality and the risk that data may be misused or presented in a misleading way. For that reason, our discussion today must approach the petition with reasoned, constructive and evidence-based recommendations. We should all be guided by what best protects children, supports survivors and strengthens public trust in safeguarding institutions when dealing with offenders.

The hon. Member is making a very clear and reasoned argument. Does he agree that everyone here cares deeply about this horrific crime, and that we should be thinking about how we can approach this together rather than attacking people over their party political positions?

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. Today, we have with us people in the Public Gallery who have been through this dreadful experience. Sadly, it leaves scars that can last a lifetime. By referring to “offenders”, this petition is focused on a person who has admitted guilt to a child sexual abuse offence or who has been found guilty of such an offence in a court of law.

Prior to this debate, I spoke to people at the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, who pointed out that although there is understandable interest in strengthening the collection and scrutiny of data relating to offenders, such an approach taken in isolation will have but limited impact on the scale of harm they are seeking to confront in order to protect children. Data on known offenders is, by its very nature, retrospective—it looks back. It tells us where the system has already failed, but it does not help us to identify where abuse is occurring right now, unseen. In this way, it is crucial to consider that better safeguarding outcomes should, first and foremost, be driven by the identification and prevention of abuse in the first instance.

Alas, the reality is that a significant proportion of child sexual abuse never reaches the criminal justice system at all. These children are not reflected in datasets or analytical frameworks based solely on convicted offenders. It is therefore worth remembering that, although offender data has its place within a broader safeguarding landscape, it is not adequate as the central focus for protecting victims and preventing further abuse. Failure to consider that risks neglecting the hidden majority of cases and misdirecting our resources and attention.

As a fellow Scottish MP, the hon. Member will know that, sadly, these gangs operate across all parts of the United Kingdom. Does he accept that we need consistency in the collection of data in Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland?

Indeed. The hon. Member has some knowledge, as I do, of the situation north of the border. The point is well made—I shall come to it shortly—that this crime is no respecter of where in the United Kingdom someone lives. Only by prioritising the identification of unreported abuse can we begin to address the true scale of the problem, rather than merely documenting its aftermath, retrospectively.

The petition makes particular reference to “gang based crime”. Many hon. Members will be aware of previous inquiries into this particular offence and its severity, which should not be undermined. However, we must remember that children can be sexually abused in many different ways by different people and in different places and situations. I think that is precisely the point to which my Scottish colleague, the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont), alluded.

I thank the hon. Member for the reasoned caveats that he lays out, but in the case of Rotherham, the gangs that were grooming and abusing young children in my constituency were predominantly of Pakistani heritage. That mattered because, had we recognised it early on, we might have been able to disrupt and prevent some of the abuse. In specific cases, we need this data and we need to be transparent. Sometimes all the caveats in the world just dilute what should be a laser focus on protecting children.

Wise words indeed.

To turn to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) touched on earlier, in England and Wales alone almost half of all child sexual abuse offences reported to the police in 2021 and 2022 took place in the family environment. That means the abuse was by parents, siblings, grandparents or anyone considered one of the family. After sexual abuse by a parent, harmful sexual behaviour by siblings is the second most common form of sexual abuse within the family environment that is reported to police.

My point is that we must be cautious about framing child sexual abuse as primarily an external or culturally othered threat, when the evidence shows that it is most often perpetrated within existing relationships of trust and care. I suggest that overemphasising outside narratives risks distorting public understanding and could distract from the full range of contexts in which abuse occurs.