Conservative mayor candidate Shaun Bailey: Condoms and abortion services push young people into crime

• Conservative London mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey said that allowing teenagers access to free contraceptives and abortion services "leads to criminality" and "normalise[s] sex."
• "By giving children condoms and the amount of sexual material they are exposed to you normalise sex and they feel it is their divine right to have it, when actually it is not," he told MPs.
• Bailey said, in comments from 2006 unearthed by Business Insider, that becoming a single mother had now become "a career choice."
• Young women "get passed around a crowd of boys" like "prostitutes," before getting pregnant and taking advantage of free housing, Bailey wrote in a separate report for a think tank.
• Bailey is standing to become London Mayor against Labour's Sadiq Khan.

LONDON - Allowing young people access to contraception and abortion services "normalise[s] sex" and pushes them towards a life of crime, the Conservatives' London Mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey has said.

Bailey, who is standing against Labour's Sadiq Khan in 2020, said in comments unearthed by Business Insider that local authorities should stop the practice of offering young people access to condoms in schools.

"You have had local authorities up and down the country who go to schools and give children condoms and say they are combating teenage pregnancy. No, they are not," Bailey told a parliamentary committee in 2006, when he was aged 35.

"By giving children condoms and the amount of sexual material they are exposed to you normalise sex and they feel it is their divine right to have it, when actually it is not," he said, adding "that is one of the things that drives their self-esteem up or down and leads to crime."

Bailey told the MPs that access to abortion services, combined with a "liberal media" pushing "pornographic" images, had also helped "lead to criminality" among young people.

"Abortions for girls as young as 14 years without their parents' knowledge, has normalised many aspects of teenage behaviour that lead to criminality," he said.

Bailey's attitude towards women came under the spotlight this week after Business Insider revealed that Bailey once wrote that single mothers "deliberately become pregnant" for benefits and suggested that society should stop suggesting it was "acceptable" to be a single mother.

Bailey reiterated this point to MPs in 2006, saying that becoming a single mother was now a "career choice."

He told MPs: "In my community single parentdom for 15-19 year-olds is a career choice. At the very least that girl will think, 'If I get pregnant I'm definitely getting housed', so she is not worried."

In a report for the think tank the Centre for Policy Studies, Bailey also wrote that: "Although these girls are not walking the street as prostitutes they will hang around with certain people.

"They will give sexual favours because it means they get drugs and stuff like that. Then there is a set of girls who get passed around a crowd of boys. The next step up from this is when you get girls starting to have a baby just to get real love. Once they have been housed with their baby and they have had longer to be alone, they can get labelled as "MILF": Mothers I'd Like to F..k."

Buzzfeed News also revealed this week that Bailey one suggested that "good looking" girls "tend to have been around."

"If a girl appeals to one that way, she'll appeal to all of them. She'll tend to have been around," he wrote.

Bailey has also been under fire in recent weeks for his suggestion, in a policy paper he wrote in 2008, that Hindu and Muslim communities "robs Britain of its community" contributing to the UK becoming a "crime-riddled cesspool."

Labour said the newly unearthed comments showed that Bailey "doesn't understand London."

Labour MP Karen Buck said: "These backward and illiberal views are further evidence that Shaun Bailey doesn't understand modern London.

"He must now say if he still believes that providing contraception to teenagers encourages crime.">

Bailey: 'Early sexual activity' is a contributing factor in crime

In a statement to Business Insider, Bailey's spokesperson denied that Bailey was trying to suggest that "access to abortions and contraceptive services" had directly led to crime.

However, they said that Bailey had been trying to explain his belief that "early sexual activity" was a contributing factor to increased crime.

"In his experience dealing with youth in his area, handing children condoms at a young age only encouraged sexual behaviour for which they were unprepared to handle the resulting emotional fallout," the spokesperson said.

They added: "Mr Bailey said it was the resulting lack of self-esteem from early sexual activity without the matching responsibility that was, in his experience, one of the contributing factors to increased criminal activity in the community, as was early drug use."

The spokesperson added that Bailey had been trying to make a wider point about "a culture that divorces consequences from actions in children that is leading to criminal activity."

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