Both at the international and national levels there’s a handful of legal acts protecting legal rights of children, the main of which is the “Convention on the Rights of the Child”, consisting of 54 articles that was adopted with the resolution 44/25 of the UN General Assembly on November 20, 1989 The Convention shall apply to all children under eighteen years of age.
However, in early March British Home Secretary Theresa May stated that the public does not fully “appreciate the true scale” of exploitation of minors in the UK.
Thus, a British portal LocalGov published a report released by West Midlands police, according to which nearly 500 children and young women have been the victims of sexual exploitation. A third of all the children mentioned in the report turned for help to local authorities, while a quarter at some point found themselves in orphanages.
On the same month local media published yet another public report on child abuse that was released in Oxfordshire, according to which in the past 16 years, 373 minors were subjected to “indescribably horrible” sexual exploitation. It was stated that criminals groomed young girls using drug, alcohol and gifts, then physically assaulted them, raped and forced into prostitution. According to the report, the ever increasing number of such crimes in the region is the direct result of inadequate actions of local authorities and the police.
In the same region the Crown Court is holding a hearing on the case of a 29-year-old male nurse Andrew Hutchinson that pleaded guilty to numerous counts of rape of unconscious women and minors while he was working at John Radcliffe Hospital in the period from 2011 to 2013. The youngest of his victims was only 10 years old.
The Guardian has recently published papers on the investigation of the National Crime Agency, (NCA), according to which more than 300 individuals assaulted over 1400 children under the age of 12 in the town of Rotherham from 1997 to 2013.
The dismissive attitude of the British authorities and local police units to sexual exploitation of minors, according to many experts, is the direct result of the detoriation of moral values in the UK, along with the fact that pedophiles from the English political elites have been using their authority to evade prosecution for their crimes against minors. This fact was explicitly pointed out by a member of the UK Labour Party, John Mann. As a result, only at this point in time UK authorities agreed to investigate a hidden community of pedophiles within the British establishment that was in existence since 1980s. After the death of a liberal politician Sir Cyril Smith in 2012 it became known that back in the 80s he allegedly took part in sex parties where teenagers were exploited, but no action to investigate this story was taken.
These claims were confirmed by the results of the recent Operation Hydrant that was launched all across Britain. Police officers stated that numerous cases of sexual abuse against children in the past four decades were not investigated due to the corrupt police officers that were bribed by politicians. Now British police is investigating the involvement of a total of 1433 suspects, including politicians and celebrities, in a secret society of pedophiles. The fact that a former BBC host Jimmy Savile was possibly one of the biggest sex offenders in the UK led to a broad discussion of the problem of pedophiles in power who are capable of escaping prosecution for a long time.
As it was stated by a former police officer that was in charge of a similar investigation, numerous cases against members of the both houses of the UK Parliament were forced into closure to protect high-ranking officials, including a member of the royal family.
The moral bankruptcy of the British society was condemned by a vicar of St John in Newland Rev Melvin Tinker who despised a flag of gay pride near his church, by comparing homosexuality with pedophilia and adultery.
Vladimir Odintsov, political commentator, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
