A new strategy designed to improve officers’ knowledge on safeguarding children and improve young people’s trust in the force has been launched by the Metropolitan Police.
The Children’s Strategy, which is two years in the making, sets out 36 commitments for the force including improving training for tens of thousands of officers on issues including tackling the adultification of children, safeguarding and how vulnerabilities can increase young people’s risk of involvement in crime.
It comes in the wake of numerous scandals faced by the Met in recent years, including the case of Child Q in 2020 during which a then 15-year-old girl was strip-searched by officers at school while on her period and the publication of a damning report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) which found the force to be “failing victims of child sexual exploitation”.
Training gaps
The strategy’s author, commander Kevin Southworth, explains that he commissioned the work to “fill a strategic gap that had been there for some time”.
He says that the publication of Every Child Matters – a 2003 government green paper – following the murder of eight-year-old Victoria Climbié at the hands of her great aunt and her partner in the capital, was the last time the force “actually set out what our position is in relation to how we police and serve children and young people across London”.
“Policing and serving young people in the way that the Met has to is a very challenging area for officers and staff so putting child first right at the centre of that work and making that a clear mission statement for us as a service is what the strategy hopefully will do,” he says.
The strategy pledges to “work with experts to improve our existing training provision focused on working with children”.
“We will prioritise improving officers’ communication, observation and listening skills and their understanding of neurodiversity and how mental ill health can manifest in children,” it states.
Another pledge will see the Met “integrate trained schools’ officers into Neighbourhood Ward teams to achieve a wider community-focused crime prevention approach to support the safety of children both inside and outside of school”.
Southworth adds that training for more than 30,000 staff, officers and volunteers will begin before the end of the year as part of a five-day intensive training programme during which one day will be dedicated to the strategy.
“It’s the biggest undertaking of training I’ve ever known during my 28 years in service, and it supports all of the [Metropolitan Police] Commissioner’s fundamental cultural drives for London,” he explains.
Tackling exploitation
Another key issue highlighted by the strategy is increased work by the force to tackle child criminal and child sexual exploitation based on concerns raised in the HMICFRS report.
“We have commenced a package of concerted action to address the priority issues raised in the report,” states the strategy.
This includes the deployment of 72 additional officers to the Met’s child exploitation teams by the end of the year, many of whom will come from specialist areas including counterterrorism.
Further plans to combat child exploitation by criminals include the creation of 64 additional posts “to local safeguarding teams to support increased information sharing and decision making”.
Reducing child prosecutions
Reviewing its work around the criminality of children is another key strand of the Met’s strategy.
It states that “it is right that we tailor our response to children depending on the gravity of their offending” with a greater focus on partnership working with youth justice services and families to utilise deferred prosecutions – where children are supported through initiatives outside of the youth justice system.
It encourages greater use of the Met’s existing Child Gravity Matrix – a triage tool to help officers decide the most appropriate outcome for children who offend.
“There is evidence that diverting children who have engaged in low-level or first-time criminality from formal criminal justice processes can protect them from future involvement,” states the report.
Sector response
Engaging the children’s sector and young people themselves was integral to shaping the strategy, Southworth explains.
“When we spoke to children particularly those from challenging backgrounds, what came through the strongest was a sense of need to have a police service that felt trustworthy and they could be confident in, and that is now what we need to use this strategy to produce.”
Ade Adetosoye, chair of the London Safeguarding Children Partnership Executive, describes the strategy as providing “an opportunity for the police to reset its relationship with children and young people”.
Reflecting on the work that has gone into the 40-page document and on the first steps of its implementation, Southworth insists that the strategy will not “become another dusty old tome” that is published and not enacted highlighting the need for action to follow publication of the strategy to lead to much-needed reform within the Met.
- Strategy from www.met.police.uk
