WHAT a strange upside down and twisted world we occupy.

Egotistical, sniggering schoolboys masquerading as responsible MPs and ministers went around naughtily touching the knees and bottoms of women 15 years ago, and it is headline news for weeks.

Heads roll, ministers are sacked and Parliament is having yet another nervous breakdown.

Meanwhile, in Bolton, exasperated neighbours from Great Lever raise the issue at an Area Forum of prostitution in their back streets.

The neighbours were humane enough to not only want the prostitution stopped, but were very concerned at hearing ‘girls as young as 14 or 15’ crying out, screaming, and being thumped’.

A young Bolton girl named Carly was murdered in similar circumstances years ago when she had been ‘let down by protection agencies’.

Rotherham and Rochdale seem to have been forgotten, when agencies (police, social services) failed hundreds of young girls who were mainly in ‘care’ and were being abused and trafficked.

The women being pawed by MPs in Parliament will be well educated and articulate.

Regulations are being enacted now to protect them, resources are apparently not an issue.

The young girls in Great Lever will be poorly educated, probably subjected to violent abuse, and from a ‘care’ (less) background.

PC Andy Sharkey says that protecting them is a ‘resource issue’.

We now have to wait for one of the girls to be murdered or battered senseless before the problem moves up the bureaucratic chain, and when it does the hierarchy will claim not to be aware that there was a problem.

I am sure that Andy is a good community bobby, but an issue of this potential seriousness should not rest within his limited scope and resources.

I have written to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse chairman Prof Alexis Jay to ask, with its budget of millions, battalions of lawyers and contacts, to see if prevention is part of their remit.

I have also written to Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, who now has the role of Police and Crime Commissioner, to make his office aware of this issue.

I have written because of a lifetime of listening to dithering and waffle from public bodies.

I will let you know if I ever get a reply from either, but they will not be able to claim that they did not know if one of these children comes to harm.

Ron Shambley

Clough Avenue

Westhoughton