By Kolawole Ojebisi
The United Kingdom has announced its determination to crush sexual predators who take delights in taking advantage of thousands of girls and young women in the country.
The British government made the announcement on Monday, stressing that it will adopt tough new laws in its bid to achieve its objective of rooting out what it described as a “scourge”.
A group of men known as grooming gangs have gained notoriety for targeting mostly white girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, some of whom lived in children’s homes.
The gangs operated in several English towns and cities including Rotherham and Rochdale in the north, but also in Oxford and Bristol, for almost four decades.
“We will change the law to ensure that adults who engage in penetrative sex with a child under 16 face the most serious charge of rape,” interior minister Yvette Cooper told parliament, as authorities launched a nationwide crackdown on the gangs.
The announcement came in the wake of a damning report written and published by member of the upper house of the UK parliament Louise Casey.
The report “concludes that further local investigations are needed, but they should be directed and overseen by a national commission with statutory inquiry powers” to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath, said Cooper.
“We agree, and we will set up a national inquiry to that effect,” she added
According to the report, the ethnicity of perpetrators was “shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data”.
But Cooper said that Asian men, particularly from a Pakistani background, were “overrepresented” and that ethnicity and nationality of suspects in grooming cases will now be recorded on a mandatory basis.
Recall that Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced on Sunday that a new national inquiry would be launched into the scandal.
Starmer made the announcement to implement one of Casey’s 12 recommendations.
