Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-10-26-Speech-3-327-000"
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"en.20111026.22.3-327-000"2
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"Mr President, in an era of rapid and apparently effortless global communications, particularly through the Internet but also now through mobile phones and iPads and the like, it is vital that we in the European Parliament work ever harder to protect children and young adults from the continuing threat of sexual and violent abuse.
We as lawmakers have a responsibility to make laws and policies which protect and promote the interests of the most vulnerable in our society. Children, for instance, should not be viewed merely as small adults. They are not always capable of asking for help or even knowing when they have been wronged. It is therefore the adults in society who must take responsibility for these children and be their strong and robust advocates.
I have been working on this issue for many years, first as a minister in the UK Home Office involved in the UN Convention on Children’s Rights, the meeting in Stockholm in Sweden in 1996 and then as rapporteur on a previous European parliamentary report back in 2000 to combat child pornography on the Internet. I called for stronger preventive measures to tackle this menace and I asked Member States to work with each other and the law enforcement agencies and units such as Europol to make sure that illegal websites were closed down and perpetrators brought to justice.
It was a very similar backbone to Ms Angelilli’s report. It concerns me that, despite the legislative, financial and specialist input into this problem, millions of children across the EU are still at risk today. The violation of children’s rights must be stopped, so I am pleased that the ECR Group and my government in the UK are supportive of the aims and proposals of this directive, which goes even further than what I proposed in 2000.
I am grateful for the work which Ms Angelilli and others from the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality and the Committee on Culture and Education have done in this area. I particularly welcome proposals to introduce a new offensive aiming to criminalise online grooming. I am also pleased this report advocates a more robust approach to criminal checks on professionals who want to work with children and encourages Member States to take the necessary steps to ensure that children who report abuse from within their own family are protected.
I would like to conclude my remarks by referring to the comments made by the British Prime Minister recently at an event in London last week which I attended. He reiterated that child trafficking and child exploitation were inexcusable and had to be stopped. Although this dossier finally does not deal specifically with child trafficking, I believe there is a political will at UK and EU level to continue our efforts to work on behalf of children and act as their advocates; they are our future, they are entitled to grow up free of these threats."@en1
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