Suffolk police have revealed that an eight-year old boy in a rural area of Suffolk raped a girl aged under 10. They also recorded the case of another eight-year old boy who sexually assaulted a girl under 13. Both were among 24 very young children that Suffolk Police were unable to prosecute because they were below the age of criminal responsibility.
When such serious sexual offences are committed by very young children in one of the most rural and socially unspoilt areas of Britain we should ask ourselves some serious questions about quite how broken some parts of our society have become. Unfortunately, at the moment we have a prime minister in Gordon Brown who, whenever the issue is raised, simply insists that society 'isn't broken'.
Rebuilding Britain's broken society will be as important a task for a future Conservative government as rebuilding an economy was for the last Conservative government at a time when many believed it to be in terminal decline. A key feature of rebuilding our broken society will be the need to sensitively address the premature sexualisation of children, whether by the advertising industry, or even some of the government's own policies. Many of us seriously question whether the government, in the form of what has been renamed the Department for Children, Schools and Families, should be seeking to impose its writ specifically on children and families. However, if there is any value at all in having a government department for children - then it surely must be to protect childhood.
