MP calling for probe to get started

A BARNSLEY MP has said an investigation into a children’s charity is long overdue – comparing it to the Rotherham child abuse scandal.

At last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, MP Miriam Cates – who represents Penistone and Stocksbridge – called on charity Mermaids to be looked into.

Ms Cates say the charity have been encouraging young children to keep secrets from their families, leading them towards a path of medical and surgical transition.

She also claimed the charity sends breast flattening devices to children behind parents’ backs, helps them change their names in secret and ‘misleadingly promotes’ experimental puberty blocking drugs to youngsters.

The charity has been publicly scrutinised in recent weeks – but Ms Cates says it’s taken far too long for something to be done.

She said: “The abuse and exploitation of children rightly causes public outrage.

“Yet for all the past scandals we remain too slow at picking up on it.

“Few scandals provoke more universal condemnation than the abuse and exploitation of children.

“Although we know it happens all too often, we are still shocked when tragic cases come to light and we cling to promises by those in authority that lessons will be learned.

“It is therefore almost unbelievable that it has taken so long for significant safeguarding concerns about children’s charity Mermaids to be taken seriously.

“Mermaids is an organisation that subscribes to extreme gender identity theory and actively recruits children to its political cause.”

Prime Minister Liz Truss last week backed Ms Cates’ calls for an investigation to be called should wrongdoing be found.

“The Charity Commission has launched an investigation, trustee Jacob Breslow has been forced to resign over disturbing links with paedophilia, and the National Lottery announced that it will suspend funding to Mermaids,” she added.

“But why have the concerns of whistleblowers – including parents’ groups like Safe Schools Alliance, Bayswater Support Group and Transgender Trend – repeatedly failed to gain public attention?

“Why have established safeguarding procedures been so blatantly disregarded to allow Mermaids and others continued access to vulnerable children?”

She added that the scandal is ‘just the tip of the iceberg’ and the public should expect ‘many more revelations’.