We need political weight to tackle child sexual exploitation

The Children’s Commissioner’s Inquiry into Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups is well-evidenced and unflinching, but not hysterical or overblown. I have never read as powerful a report on such a topic.

It is both a wake-up call for all the agencies, professionals and voluntary groups working with children, and a reminder of what we lost when the present government threw out the children's agenda and the Department for Children, Schools and Families to focus almost exclusively on education.

Although Michael Gove has recently shown signs of a refocus on child protection, I suspect that this may be in the nature of a pre-emptive strike, if he has read an early version of this report.

There are two points of substance that I want to raise. The first is that while child sexual exploitation outside the family is really serious and needs to be addressed, abuse inside the family is more common, and this leads to major challenges for professionals in assessing what is really going on, especially when the children and young people concerned are unwilling to speak out. And this is made all the more difficult when local integrated children's services set up under the previous government are being dismantled, sometimes under the cover of “reducing bureaucracy”.

Second, the scale of the problem. With scale, I always find it easier to map things onto an area I know well: Dudley in the West Midlands, an average local authority with about 20 secondary schools and a population of around 300,000, so about 0.75 per cent of the nation. In this context, more than 100 children might be expected to be identified as being at risk of child sexual exploitation during one year, with about 18 confirmed victims. This is about one per secondary school, and the point I'm making is that this is a significant number.