Yvette Cooper

Yvette Cooper

Labour — Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley

Speaking in the House of Commons on 6 January 2025

Debate

Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

Contribution

I welcome the hon. Member’s really important point about the response having to be colour-blind and class-blind. It has to see these things for what they are: really terrible crimes, often against the most vulnerable young people, as he says. Young people were dismissed because they were vulnerable due to the difficult experiences that they might have had. Young girls were often not taken seriously, and myths operated in the way that services responded. A lot of work has been done to challenge those myths, but the reality is that unless we have a proper, strong performance management framework in place, and strong requirements on local organisations and agencies to respond and to take this issue seriously enough, the risk is that it just becomes lost in a corner, as opposed to being treated as the very serious crime that it is. That is why we want to embed this as part of a proper performance framework for policing, and to work with local councils too.

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