'Care professionals haven't been in the shoes of exploited children'

More than five years since the conviction of nine men for serially sexually exploiting and abusing girls in Rochdale – and with numerous other convictions for child sexual exploitation secured across the country – it seems that attitudes to identifying and addressing this risk are starting to change.

“Increasingly, we would do well to look at child sexual exploitation not in its own silo, but to [also] understand that the harms young people face often interlink,” says Dez Holmes, director of Research in Practice at Dartington Hall Trust. “When we look at the mechanisms by which children are exploited, we might well see synergies across things like criminal exploitation and gang activity, or intimate partner violence between young people.”

Research in Practice was commissioned in 2015 by Wigan and Rochdale councils to review evidence around child sexual exploitation (CSE) interventions, and published a revised review last year. It revealed that some experts were starting to question the value of having a separate definition for CSE when it is unarguably a form of child sexual abuse and that some established concepts that were useful at the time of development, such as grooming, may need to be reconsidered as harmful in themselves.

Both councils wanted to ensure their services to protect children at risk of CSE were rooted in best practice evidence and, where possible, prevented children coming into care. The councils are piloting new ways of working, based on the evidence review, which will inform all 10 local authorities in Greater Manchester.

Gail Hopper, director of children’s services at Rochdale council, says the statutory framework within which local authorities must work does not reflect the nature of the risk faced by young people.

“Government guidance is about children who are at risk within their own families,” she says. “But in the CSE context, many young people have good parents who are terrified and want to do everything possible [to help their children].” The current system “says your only option is to put a child protection plan in place that questions the parents’ ability to look after that child”, she explains.

But this approach takes no account of the fact that in such situations, as in Rochdale, the risk often lies outside the home, in the environments young people spend time in and the relationships they build with people their families do not know.

With money from the Department for Education Innovation Fund, Rochdale and Wigan councils asked families and children with experience of CSE how they would want to be supported. “For many years, professionals have thought we have the answers, but we’ve not been in the shoes of people who are survivors of CSE,” says Hopper.

These approaches are not trying to tell young people how to stop themselves being sexually exploited, but aim to understand situations in which they could be vulnerable. Teenagers said they wanted to have time to build relationships with social workers before sharing sensitive information, so the usual deadline for completing an assessment was set aside as part of the pilot project. Today, statutory child protection plans aren’t used for children at risk of CSE in Rochdale unless they need to be.

Parents felt that child protection conferences portrayed them as ineffectual; as a result, a different kind of meeting was instigated, focused on what the child and their parents wanted to change.

Examining what works is important because issues have arisen nationwide with the lack of a research base for interventions to combat CSE, says Holmes. She says CSE risk-assessment toolkits are not always based on rigorous evidence, according to research led by Professor Sarah Brown of Coventry University.

Holmes is also concerned that some educational materials used in schools may imply that children have a responsibility to prevent their own abuse.

Meanwhile, Hackney council is using money from the Innovation Fund to embed a “contextual safeguarding” approach into its CSE work. Created by Bedfordshire University’s Dr Carlene Firmin, the concept acknowledges that as children move through adolescence, their vulnerabilities to risk are increasingly shaped by social influences rather than their families. For example, young people groomed and sexually abused within their friendship group is a priority concern, says Sarah Wright, Hackney’s director of children’s services.

“Some of our very high-risk young women [are] friends with each other; they’re coming into care, they’re going missing together, they’re introducing each other to people they think of as friends, and are being exposed to things we see as exploitative that they wouldn’t necessarily think of as such,” says Wright.

“Within that, [there are] young men who probably don’t recognise their behaviours as abusive ... So we started to develop responses around sexually harmful behaviour – recognising that those young men need support as well.”

Hackney’s contextual safeguarding pilot is now working out how best to assess risk beyond the family, how information on young people’s lives is pulled together from different agencies, and how to evaluate potential harm in the environments teenagers spend time in.

The longer-term issue will be to mainstream new CSE interventions that require cooperation from people and organisations outside the family. When a child protection system is set up to primarily address risk within the home, there are no legal mechanisms to make it work for dangers from a different source, says Firmin.

The Children Act does not compel action from anyone outside a young person’s family, so Firmin is consulting on whether other legal tools could be used alongside it, or if the legislation itself needs to be amended.
Changes in policy and practice around CSE must build incrementally based on evidence, rather than sweeping slates clean, suggests Holmes. She says it is important to create policy with nuance and flexibility.

Holmes believes that while local authorities and charities are good at change, they need an environment in which reflection and evolution is possible. She says: “It means inspectors being able to look at what counts, rather than just counting.”

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