Major victory for Lancashire Telegraph campaign

9:54pm Wednesday 5th December 2007

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THE Lancashire Telegraph has won a major victory in its campaign to stop children being groomed for sex after a national investigation into the problem was launched.

The Home Office has commissioned a country-wide inquiry into sexual grooming and abduction, which involves girls as young as 10 being targeted by groups of men.

It comes 17 months after we launched our Keep Them Safe campaign, highlighting the problem, which predomi-nantly involves Asian men, and calling for action to protect the victims.

Senior politicians - including Blackburn MP and Justice Minister Jack Straw - have now heralded our campaign as a major reason behind the decision to carry out the investigation.

Mr Straw said: "The Telegraph has exposed some extremely worrying and outrageous examples in our area of children being groomed for prostitution.

"I have been raising this issue and the Telegraph campaign in meetings I have had over the last few months.

"The Home Office is fully aware of the Lancashire Telegraph campaign and the newspaper has played a major role in bringing this issue to public attention."

Lancashire Telegraph editor Kevin Young said: "It is heartening to see the government instigating this initiative. This is an extremely sensitive subject and the Telegraph gave it a lot of consideration before launch-ing its campaign.

"We need a bold and intell-igent strategy from the gover-nment to tackle this enormous problem. It will need fine judgement and political bravery to stamp it out."

A working group called the UK Internal Trafficking Group has been formed to examine the problem, the causes behind it and law changes to increase the likel-ihood of convictions. Ongoing research will be co-ordinated by the United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre (UKHTC), based in Sheffield.

Grooming involves young girls being given gifts such as jewellery and mobile phones and later alcohol or drugs by youths who pretend to be their boyfriends. They are then often turned against their family and pers-uaded to have sex with the boy and other, often older, men to repay the gifts. In some cases they are then moved out of the area and used as prostitutes.

In August two men, one from Blackburn and one from Burnley, were jailed for five years and eight months for exploiting vulnerable under 16s after being caught through Operation Engage, a joint venture between police and Blackburn with Darwen Council to help victims and catch the men targeting them.

Sara Swann MBE, from Pendle, is a leading campaig-ner against child sex explo-itation, with over 25 years experience and has helped set up projects across the country to stop children being groom-ed as well as advising the government on the subject.

She said: "Anything which raises the issue, such as the Lancashire Telegraph campa-ign, must be welcomed and will have helped lead to this.

"There is no research at all in the internal trafficking of children in the UK so anything that we can do has to be welcomed.

"We know children are being moved around from place to place."

Last month police and bosses from Blackburn with Darwen Council attended a national conference to share ideas and experiences in a bid to tackle the problem at Hay-dock Park, Newton-le-Willows.

Coun Colin Rigby, leader of the council, said: "This grooming and exploitation is happening locally and that it is been recognised as a great step forward.

"The Telegraph has brought it to people's attention locally and now it is receiving national attention."

Coun Gordon Birtwistle, leader of Burnley Council, added: "I congratulate the Lancashire Telegraph for its campaign and I hope it continues to be successful in getting action on this serious problem."

Grahame Maxwell, Chief Constable of North Yorkshire Police, help set up UKHTC when he was Deputy Chief Constable in South Yorkshire.

He said: "We are talking about people who don't want to talk about things in the open.

"When they find out the extent to which the exploit-ation has been carried out on them, how much they have been abused, it's a very difficult thing to comes to terms with.

"Even more so when they're actually asked to give evidence before a court, to relive all the many horrendous experiences that they've had to go through."