Members of grooming gangs should be sentenced to whole-life tariffs, Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick has said tonight.
In new proposals to crack down on group-based child sexual exploitation, the former Immigration Minister has also called for the automatic deportation of non-British offenders.
Jenrick’s proposals come after GB News revealed that a Rotherham grooming gangs survivor was told she could not call for her abusers to be deported in her victim impact statement at a sentencing in Sheffield Crown Court last month.
In a series of policy demands, Jenrick has also called for raising the mandatory sentences of grooming gang abusers to whole-life sentences.
It comes as GB News reveals that Mohammed Amar, who was convicted of abusing an 11-year-old girl, is appealing his 14-year jail term.
Jenrick is also calling for a ‘blacklist’ on any public sector officials who failed to report grooming gang abuse, so they cannot work in another public role, and a national memorial for victims of this sort of child abuse in Rotherham.
The former minister’s intervention comes after then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman announced a grooming gangs crackdown last April.
In a campaigning win for this broadcaster, Braverman launched a new taskforce led by the National Crime Agency to hunt for abusers and gather better data about the crimes, as proposed by the GB News documentary Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame.
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Jenrick said: “Some of the reforms that Suella Braverman brought forward as Home Secretary during the last Government have worked well. The dedicated Grooming Gangs taskforce led to the arrest of over 550 suspects in a single year.”
He added that Government needed to “go much further” in tackling this form of child abuse.
“Anyone who thinks these crimes are no longer happening is delusional. That view, sadly widespread across the most powerful people in Britain, is condemning more working-class girls to these savage and life-ruining crimes.
“The Telford Report is clear that this exploitation ‘still exists today, and is prevalent across the country as a whole’.”
Describing the abuse as a “moral stain” on the country, Jenrick added that he would introduce permanent tagging and injunctions for grooming gang predators.
Several survivors of the grooming gangs across the country have told GB News that they have to face seeing their abusers in their local communities after they are released from prison.
“This injustice must end,” said Jenrick, adding: “Anyone who has committed these crimes should be given a lifetime injunction from going anywhere near their victims, even if that means they cannot live in the town where they committed their crimes.”
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