A rape gang survivor has condemned Labour's decision to scale back local inquiries into grooming gangs, describing it as a "profound betrayal" to victims.Lucia Rea expressed her dismay at the Government's backtracking on child sexual exploitation investigations.FULL STORY HERE.
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00:00Can I first get your take on the disappointing news yesterday?
00:03The Labour Party was seeming to water down these five local inquiries.
00:09Yeah, it's just complete dismay with this,
00:13this kind of backtracking from the government,
00:16especially on something as serious as CSE.
00:18It's just, it's a profound betrayal to the survivors.
00:22You know, they didn't take these as these political promises as,
00:26you know, there was lifelines to the survivors
00:29thinking they was going to get justice.
00:31And we now found ourselves in a situation
00:33where we won't have the I'm all right, Jack attitude in Oldham.
00:37We wanted this for the nation.
00:39We know that there's a lot of areas need looking at.
00:42And the five wasn't enough.
00:44And to think that four of them have now been excluded
00:47and only one town is going to receive what is due.
00:51And even that's not statutory, so that's still not good enough.
00:54It's just undermined what very little trust was there in the first place.
00:58The survivors don't have trust in authorities and they've made it even worse now.
01:04Lucia, may I ask you perhaps a difficult question?
01:08What do you think that the institution, the government, the police,
01:13the authorities and now specifically the Labour Party, what are they afraid of?
01:16Why don't they want a full, open statutory inquiry?
01:20That's the golden question, Martin.
01:23We, you know, we, even this, I think this audit has been delayed.
01:27Is it Baroness Louise Casey was supposed to be looking into the data around that?
01:31That's, you know, it was supposed to come out this month.
01:34I think that's going to be delayed as well.
01:35You think, have they seen something in this data?
01:38They can't face it.
01:39You know, they're making these decisions.
01:41We don't know what's changed, who they've consulted to come to this conclusion.
01:45And then they just drop it like a bomb on these survivors again and make them re-traumatised.
01:52And they're not even offering any specialised support after this.
01:56So we don't know why they're doing this and why they don't want to.
02:00And Lucia, as well as just years and years of looking the other way,
02:05have there been no accountability?
02:08Today, there was the extra blow that the seven-year historical window for claims
02:14has now been reduced to two.
02:17That means that, let's be frank about this,
02:20if somebody was raped two years and one day ago,
02:24they now have no way to open a case.
02:26And specifically, that seven-year window was meant to help those who suffered historic abuse
02:31because they weren't listened to for so long.
02:34It's just this terrible, shocking news.
02:37And that's if the authorities can find the records.
02:40You know, we have survivors that, you know, authorities,
02:43their records seem to go into a black hole.
02:46And they're spending years of their life chasing this around.
02:49So to reduce it to even two, it's just,
02:52they can't keep doing this to survivors and their families.
02:55They're living and breathing this day in, day out.
02:59And like I said, it's just re-traumatising all the time for them.