Five children rescued from paedophile dens

Five children have been rescued from paedophiles in a series of raids on homes in England and Scotland.

The boys and girls, aged between seven and 13, had been attacked on a regular basis and their abusers had planned to broadcast their ordeals over the internet.

Prosecutors in Edinburgh said that the police raids took place last month on three properties in central Scotland using intelligence gathered after the arrest of a man for alleged sexual offences.

Scottish police passed on information to their English counterparts, who carried out further raids.

Scotland’s National Sex Crimes Unit (NSCU), established earlier this year, has begun legal proceedings against a number of suspects.

“This was one of our most harrowing and disturbing cases, but it clearly demonstrated the value of, and real need for, the unit,” said Derek Ogg QC, who heads the NSCU.

“Until the police investigation revealed these results, we were unaware of the full extent of child exploitation going on in our own backyard.”

The NSCU was established in March, and is the only unit of its type in Europe, with a team of eight prosecutors involved from the first complaint of a sex crime all the way through to its prosecution.

It is modelled on the Sex Crime Unit in the New York County District Attorney’s office, which has been dedicated to the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault since 1974. As well as increasing conviction rates, the New York unit is credited with handling its caseload with a sensitivity to the issues involved for victims.

“It takes amazing dedication sifting through the evidence to get success like this,” Mr Ogg told the Daily Record.

“We did our bit by making sure local fiscals’ sexual offences teams, led by us, cut through any red tape of bureaucracy, allowing the police to move fast and put the kids first. continues here

One in four British children living in poverty due to breakdown of traditional families

The growth of single-parent families has led to a quarter of children growing up in the poorest fifth of homes, an official report said yesterday. 

The study by the Office for National Statistics found the number of children living in the poorest households has soared in the last 30 years. 

The analysis by the Government's statistics body is intended to show who has won and who has lost from the big changes in earnings, taxation and state benefits over the three decades to 2007. 

It said the number of single parent families represented only 3 per cent of homes in 1977. This has since doubled to 6 per cent. 

In 1977, 19 percent of children lived in the poorest fifth of homes. This rose to nearly 30 percent by 1997 as the numbers of lone parent families grew. 

Nearly a quarter of all children now live with single parents and the numbers of lone mothers have trebled since the 1970s. 

Author Francis Jones said that the history of the economy over three decades had been 'a game of two halves'. During the 1980s high earners became much better off, but rich and poor have stayed in much the same position since the early 1990s.

Even the poorest have seen their incomes rise as the overall wealth of individuals and families has more than doubled since the 1970s.

Labour's tax and benefit changes since 1997 have made little difference to the equality gap between rich and poor, it found.

But while ministers have tinkered with the levers of the economy, the shift that has really decided on who is well off and who is poor is the revolution in family life, the report said.

The ONS said that the count of children in the poorest fifth of homes has fallen to 25 percent since Gordon Brown introduced the tax credit benefit system in the late 1990s.

However, a series of Whitehall studies have shown that tax credits, which pump money into single parent families, has left two-parent families who rely on just one earner much worse off. 

Department of Work and Pensions figures this year showed that children now dropping into poverty are almost entirely those who live with two parents.
Numbers of children in the poorest fifth of households - which rely on state benefits for most of their income - is now nearly a third higher than in 1977.

The ONS report yesterday that children have now joined the elderly as those most likely to be poor.

It said: 'Along with retired households, one adult households with children are the other main group of households that are highly concentrated in the lower part of the income distribution.

'The combination of low employment income and the presence of children results in low incomes.'

It added: 'The increase in one adult households in the bottom group was simply due to the increase in their number, rather than any change in their overall position in the income distribution.'

Labour is pledged to lift children out of poverty.

However, the Government has maintained since coming to power in 1997 that all kinds of families are equally good and that there is no advantage for children in having two parents or married parents.

All research continues to show that, despite the availability of tax credits, children with single parents are poorer, less healthy, do less well at school, and are more likely to fall into worklessness, drug abuse, crime and single parenthood themselves as adults.

The report led to new calls from supporters of the traditional family for new state policies to encourage parents to stick together.  continues here

Childcare is bad for your baby, working parents are warned

A Unicef study suggests that government policy is at odds with the developmental needs of children under 12 months



Parents and governments are taking a “high-stakes gamble” with the long-term wellbeing of children by subjecting them to long hours of formal childcare from a very young age, according to a Unicef report.

The study, which has prompted Beverley Hughes, the Children’s Minister, to complain to the UN agency, recommends that all children should where possible be cared for by parents at home during the first 12 months of life. Children from the poorest homes face the double disadvantage of being born into material deprivation and receiving sub-standard childcare, Unicef says.

The research, which draws on a wealth of scientific and psychological studies, as well as government data, is bound to reignite the fraught debate on whether overexposure to formal childcare is bad for very young children.

It is also likely to provoke concerns over whether growing political, social and economic pressure on parents, particularly those on low incomes, to return to work soon after their child is born is at odds with emerging research into children’s brains showing the importance of stable one-to-one care in the first year of life.

The study suggests that government policies on maternity leave and childcare provision could be at odds with “today’s knowledge of the critical developmental needs of the very young child”.

The report ranks Britain joint 11th out of 25 developed nations for the quality of its childcare policies and calls for government expenditure on the sector to be raised to 1 per cent of GDP. To achieve this, Britain would have to double its present levels of spending.

David Bull, the executive director of Unicef UK, said that despite spending on preschool education in England having quadrupled in the past ten years, “high-quality childcare is not yet available to all, and parental leave provisions remain inadequate”. He added: “The report is also clear that rich nations have often been guilty of making policies based on economic considerations, not the best interests of the child.”

Last night Ms Hughes that she had written to Unicef to complain that the report was full of factual inaccuracies that misrepresented Britain’s position on childcare and early learning in a number of ways and that it may well do the same for other countries.

The report has been published at a key point in the childcare debate. Children born today into the rich world are part of the first generation in which a majority will spend a large part of their early childhood in childcare. In Britain about 80 per cent of those aged 3 to 6 are now in some form of formal childcare or education. For those under 3, the proportion is now 25 per cent.

In part, this reflects new opportunities for women to be employed outside the home. But it also reflects new pressures, particularly on the poorest, to return to work as soon as possible after a birth – often to low-paid jobs.

The report notes that high-quality formal childcare can bring huge benefits to children, particularly those from disadvantaged homes, expanding their social and cognitive development and providing them with stimulation that they might not get at home.

But it cites research from Britain and the US suggesting that children who spend too long in formal childcare at too young an age may suffer from long-term effects, including behavioural problems, aggression, antisocial behaviour, depression and an inability to concentrate – although the effects are thought to be relatively small.

The report, drawn up in consultation with governments and academic experts from several countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and with the World Bank, suggests that the age at which group childcare becomes appropriate is somewhere between 1 and 2.

The report also notes that, despite considerable investment in early-years care, particularly through the Sure Start programme for under5s, Britain is among a small number of countries where the provision of good childcare is being hampered by a lack of well-trained staff.

“Employment in nurseries and daycare centres is often seen as suitable for those who are very young, unqualified, transient, or all three,” it states, adding that “such views are dangerously out of date”.

Because poor families are under the greatest pressure to find cheap childcare at the earliest opportunity, their children are most at risk, the study says. To counter this, it recommends that childcare services provided for the poorest be heavily subsidised.

Sue Owen, of the children’s charity NCB, said that British parents should not panic at the findings: huge strides had been made in the past decade to improve childcare provision. The importance of one-to-one care for infants aged under a year was already recognised by most formal childcare providers. “The concept of having a key worker who builds up a one-to-one relationship with your child has been very strong in Britain for years,” she said.

Maria Millar, the Shadow Minister for Families, said that urgent action was needed to ensure that the poorest families had access to high-quality preschool services so that the cycle of poverty could be broken.

The report follows a controversial study by Unicef last year claiming that Britain’s children were the unhappiest in the West . That report led to the Government’s ten-year Children’s Plan, which aims to make Britain the best place for children to grow up.

For: Daycare creates confident adolescents

— A study of the effectiveness of the Early Head Start programme in the US, based on 3,000 families in 17 programmes, has shown that participating children have better cognitive and language development, are more capable of sustained attention and behave less aggressively towards others

— The Canadian researchers G Cleveland and M Krashinsky found that “good childcare can compensate, at least partially, for a disadvantaged home life”. They added: “Although early childhood education and care benefits all children, much of the evidence suggests that the largest benefits flow to children from the most disadvantaged families”

— The 2005 report The Economics of Investing in Universal Preschool Education in California found that children who attended preschool were more likely to graduate from high school, earned higher salaries as adults and were less likely to become involved in crime. The authors claim that even if only 25 per cent of California’s children benefited from universal preschool education, the state could still expect a return of $2 for every $1 invested

— The Effective Provision of Preschool Education study in Britain concludes that preschool enhances children’s cognitive and social development and the effects are greatest for disadvantaged children

— A long-term study of the effects of early childhood services in Sweden by Bengt Erik-Andersson found that “early entrance into daycare tends to predict a creative, socially confident, popular, open and independent adolescent” continues here