Peter Saull
Political editor, BBC East Midlands
BBC
Labour’s Natalie Fleet said she used to tell her friends: “I can’t be an MP – I was a teenage parent”
“You’ve ruined your life, not only for you, but for your unborn daughter.”
Natalie Fleet fell pregnant at 15 and says she was made to feel like it was entirely her fault, despite being a victim of statutory rape.
The Labour MP for Bolsover in Derbyshire is now campaigning to change the law to stop rapists having parental rights – and says she has the the prime minister’s backing.
Fleet grew up on a council estate in Sutton-in-Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, where she started seeing an older man.
“He tells me all the things a young girl wants to hear, and I thought that it was lovely,” she said. “I thought that it was serious.”
But when she told him she was pregnant, she realised it was anything but.
She added: “It was all about him, essentially, making sure that he had as much sex as he could with a girl under 16.”
Reflecting on attitudes growing up, Fleet said: “It was all about – ‘you shouldn’t have done this. You’ve ruined your life, not only for you, but for your unborn daughter’.
“So I just took that. I had no reason to question that.”
Fleet said the Blair-era Labour government did some “really good work” on teenage pregnancy.
She added: “But what was never, ever asked was, where did the father come from? What happened here? What type of relationship were you in?”
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Fleet has previously described her daughter as the “absolute love of her life”
Her experience made her question whether she was fit to run for office, telling friends “I can’t be an MP – I was a teenage parent”.
But now that she’s in Parliament, following her election win last year, she says she feels a responsibility to speak out, even if others might find the telling of her story shocking.
She says that she feels “really lucky about the way I was raped”, because she has indisputable proof about what happened to her.
“That is an awful thing for me to have to say, but it’s very true,” Fleet said.
“I have a birth certificate that proves my age. I have a birth certificate that proves her [daughter’s] age. I have a DNA test that links the two.”
Fleet points to crime survey data via the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which suggests one in four women have either been raped or sexually assaulted.
“Ultimately, every one of us has either been raped or knows somebody who’s been raped,” she said. “Yet nobody’s talking about it.
“It’s a part of our story as women. It’s a part that we’re not telling and I’m lucky that I can prove mine.”
Amendment to bill
Fleet is now trying to bring about a law change that would remove parental rights from rapists.
With the support of ministers, Fleet is aiming to amend the Victims and Courts Bill, which is currently at committee stage.
A similar amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill – tabled last year under the previous Conservative government – would have meant that when child rapists are sentenced, their ability to make decisions about their children’s lives would be suspended.
Fleet said: “It means he can’t have decisions over medical issues. He can’t have full access to the child before prison and after prison. He can’t interfere with that child’s life from prison.
“I think that children cannot be the only proceed of crime that criminals have lifelong access to.”
The MP added the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer – a former director of public prosecutions – was not aware that such a law did not exist.
“He said, ‘yeah, I just, I didn’t know that that was a thing. And we can get some wording into a bill, that means that we can stop that’,” Fleet said.
She added her work had also received Royal backing, after mentioning her campaign to Queen Camilla at an event at Buckingham Palace.
Fleet said: “I was telling her about the law change and she said, ‘oh, I’ll help you’.”
It was an experience the former council estate girl describes as “surreal” and “incredible”.
But nothing tops another recent milestone, the birth of her first granddaughter.
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The MP for Bolsover is now a grandmother
She said: “Becoming a mum at 15, basically it felt at the time as bad as it gets, but being a Nana at 40, that’s like winning all the jackpots put together.”
She hopes that one day her new “favourite constituent” will tell her grandchildren how “he did it, and she hid it”.
“And I want that to be the part that they don’t believe,” Fleet said. “I want them to say Nana, why didn’t women just speak out?
“Nana, why were men so easily able to get away with it?
“And it feels like a real privilege to be able to start that conversation.”
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