A joint inspection of six youth offending teams (YOTs) led by the Probation Inspectorate looked at a total of 24 cases.
It found that once children had been picked up by the justice system, their chances for rehabilitation improved because they benefitted from the “child-focused” approach of YOT workers.
However, the report found that interventions could have taken place earlier and that cases were slow to get to court, taking an average six months between detection and sentence.
As a result of this, there were “lengthy periods” where little or no work was being done with the young person.
Much of the work that was done was “characterised by poor communication” between the relevant agencies – including YOTs, children’s services, schools and police – and inspectors found staff were too often responsible for “inadequate assessment and joint planning”.
Although the young people displayed complex and multiple needs, examples of joined-up interventions to help them were rare.
Chief Inspector of Probation, Liz Calderbank, said: “The behaviour of this small but significant group of children and young people can be extremely damaging, often involving other children as victims.
“Yet the evidence from our inspection is that these children and young people do respond to intervention from youth offending teams and can be prevented from reoffending before developing entrenched patterns of behaviour.
“We were therefore very concerned to find that a sizeable number of these children had been referred on previous occasions to children’s services, but the significance of their sexual behaviour was either not recognised or dismissed.
“This, to us, represented a lost opportunity, both for the children themselves and their potential victims.”
Laura Janes, consultant solicitor at the Howard League for Penal Reform, said the report highlighted “critical gaps” in services for young people committing sexual offences.
“More often than not, the lives and prospects of reintegration of these young people have been impeded by the rigid mechanics of a criminal justice system that fails to recognise their specific needs as children,” she said.
“While the report considers services for children in the community, it is important to remember that a significant number of children are imprisoned for sexual offences.
"It is essential that community alternatives are sufficiently robust to offer a viable alternative to custody. Children who are detained for sexual offences tend to face many of the problems highlighted once released.”
