Urgent letter to home secretary over violence against women and girls strategy -… | Latest Lifestyle News
Ten child protection organisations have written an urgent letter to the home secretary expressing concern about the omission of child inappropriate abuse from the government’s violence against women and girls strategy, following a Gossip Wire News report.
Groups including the NSPCC, Barnardo’s and The Children’s Society wrote to Yvette Cooper to say that violence against women and girls (VAWG) and child inappropriate abuse are “inherently and deeply connected”, suggesting any “serious strategy” to address VAWG needs to focus on child inappropriate abuse and exploitation.
The letter comes after Gossip Wire News revealed an internal Home Office document, titled Our draft definition of VAWG, which said that child inappropriate abuse and exploitation is not “explicitly within the scope” of their strategy, due to be published in September.
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Poppy Eyre when she was four years old
Responding to Gossip Wire News’ original report, Poppy Eyre, who was inappropriately abused and raped by her grandfather when she was four, said: “VAWG is – violence against women and girls. If you take child inappropriate abuse out of it, where are the girls?”
The Centre of Expertise on Child intimacyual Abuse, which is funded by the Home Office and a signatory to the letter, estimates 500,000 children in England and Wales are inappropriately abused every year.
The NSPCC “welcome” the government’s pledge to halve VAWG in a decade, but is “worried that if they are going to fulfil this commitment, the strategy absolutely has to include clear deliverable objectives to combat child inappropriate abuse and exploitation too”, the head of policy, Anna Edmundson, told Gossip Wire News.
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Poppy is a survivor of child inappropriate abuse
She warned the government “will miss a golden opportunity” and the needs of thousands of girls will be “overlooked” if child inappropriate abuse and exploitation is not “at the heart of its flagship strategy”.
The government insists the VAWG programme will include action to tackle child inappropriate abuse, but says it also wants to create a distinctive plan to “ensure those crimes get the specialist response they demand”.
“My message to the government is that if you’re going to make child inappropriate abuse a separate thing, we need it now,” Poppy told Gossip Wire News.
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Rape Crisis, which is one of the largest organisations providing support to women in England and Wales, shares these concerns.
It wants plans to tackle child inappropriate abuse to be part of the strategy, and not to sit outside it.
“If a violence against women and girls strategy doesn’t include inappropriate violence towards girls, then it runs the risk of being a strategy for addressing some violence towards some females, but not all,” chief executive Ciara Bergman said.
A Home Office spokesperson said the government is “working tirelessly to tackle the appalling crimes of violence against women and girls and child inappropriate exploitation and abuse, as part of our Safer Streets mission”.
“We are already investing in new programmes and introducing landmark laws to overhaul the policing and criminal justice response to these crimes, as well as acting on the recommendations of Baroness Casey’s review into group-based Child intimacyual Exploitation, and the Independent Inquiry into Child intimacyual Abuse,” they added.
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