There was an urgent call to action to protect children from being sexualised at a Parliamentary conference in Portcullis House, Westminster this week.
In light of a number of high profile scandals in the media of child abuse, the event Sexualising our Children: The Hidden Crisis was a timely challenge to take practical steps to protect the next generation from being exploited.
“The aim of this very important event is to raise the issue of awareness and to come away with a strategy that we can work together towards to have an influence on the government and have legislation to protect our young people,” said event sponsor Jim Dobbins, MP for Rochdale and Chairman of The Lords and Commons Family and Child Protection Group.
Around 100 delegates, many from campaigning organisations working to protect children, heard a range of speakers tackle a diverse range of subjects adversely affecting the welfare of children. These included SRE provision, sexual health advice and the highest teenage pregnancy and abortion rates in Western Europe.
“It is very telling, that pre-1960s, conception rates for teenagers were so insignificant as to be statistically unrecordable. But with the advent of sex education, we are now routinely seeing over 30,000 teenage conceptions a year, half of which end in abortion," said Lynda Rose, Director of Voice for Justice UK.
Conference organiser Robert Harris talked about the deficiencies of the Bailey Report, a government commissioned review looking at the issues of child sexualisation: “The big gap in the Bailey remit is that there is no mention of the education sphere and there’s a huge amount of sexualisation going on in the classroom.
He added: “We want to sound the alarm as best we can to tell people how serious this crisis has become. A lot of people realise there’s a problem. What they don’t know is the scale of the problem.”
Organisers say delegates were unanimous in calling for the government to urgently reassess sex education policy. In particular, they demanded broader representation in policy forming bodies, which are currently dominated by sexually permissive interest groups, ridiculing traditional morality.
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A new initiative was launched this week, "Campaign to Protect Children" (C2PC). Visit www.c2pc.org.uk.
Watch a video report from the conference >