Project helps Essex young people vulnerable to exploitation
Nina Jacobs
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Service supports young people to reduce risk-taking behaviour that makes them vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
- It also runs prevention programmes in schools with children displaying worrying behaviour
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More than eight out of 10 young people worked with report an improvement in their situation
ACTION
For vulnerable young people in Essex at risk of child sexual exploitation (CSE), the Children at Risk of Exploitation (CARE) service can represent the “last line of support” after they have spurned offers of help from statutory agencies.
“We work with those that don’t or can’t work with statutory services,” explains Leanne Fuller, CARE service manager.
“Social care might have a young person they are working with but in terms of exploitation, they won’t talk to them for fear of criminalising themselves or others.
“It could also be due to a sense of shame or guilt or the fact they don’t recognise themselves [as] a victim.”
This is particularly true for those young people for whom exploitative behaviour has become normalised, she adds.
“You might have a young boy or girl who’s never known anything different so the idea of being passed around by the person they are in a relationship with or the sharing of images and videos they are forced to produce – that’s something that can be quite normal to them, so that’s a challenge,” says Fuller.
The service, which works with young people aged eight to 24, was set up in 2016 for three years to support such young people who had been groomed or sexually exploited or that were at medium to high risk of this type of abuse. It is one of a range of projects to support young people at risk of CSE or child criminal exploitation (CCE) developed by The Children’s Society across England, including Essex, London, Devon, Nottinghamshire, North Yorkshire and Tyne and Wear. These complement a number of its national programmes (see box).
When the CARE service was recommissioned in 2019, its remit was extended to include those young people also at risk of CCE.
“We were able to show there was this growing need around criminal exploitation,” says Fuller.
“We were seeing increasing numbers of referrals where the young people weren’t just being sexually exploited, it was crossing over into criminal exploitation as well.”
Funding from Essex County Council, the local police and crime commissioner and the Big Lottery Community Fund mean the service will continue to operate from its base in Chelmsford, as well as other offices in Essex, until March 2022.
Discussions are ongoing about the service being recommissioned thereafter, but Fuller is confident it will continue.
The team is made up of a service manager, a group worker and three one-to-one practitioners taking referrals from across Essex with the exception of Southend and Thurrock.
In the last five years, it has received more than 800 referrals and engaged with more than 700 young people both through group work and individual support sessions.
Fuller says they receive a lot of referrals from education professionals, many of which are keen to run group work in schools.
She adds: “They will put a cohort together and say these are the individuals we are concerned about or they might have received concerns from parents about their [children’s] online use.
“We may know they’ve met people online or they’ve had missing reports or they might be hanging around with those that are affiliated with criminal networks.”
However, the service receives most referrals for one-to-one support from social care, with interventions lasting on average around six months.
The criteria for referral means many of these young people are already at medium to high risk at the point of engagement. They are usually offered between four and six weekly sessions before a review is held.
“We hold those sessions around safety, grooming aspects, exploitation, healthy relationships and then we’ll get an idea of whether the young person needs more intervention or if we can close the case,” explains Fuller.
“On average, our cases are open for around six months because a lot of that is getting the young person to recognise what’s happened to them, the trauma and impact of that and how they can go forward and keep themselves safe.”
In terms of improving outcomes for these young people and their families, the programme also offers support in partnership with Barnardo’s for parents and carers.
Up to March this year, the charity had worked with more than 130 adults through one-to-one sessions or group work.
Around 240 parents or carers have also taken part in workshops, training sessions or events organised by the programme.
Even in situations where a young person does not want to engage, the Barnardo’s team will still work with their parents and family, says Fuller.
“Sometimes parents can find themselves in a really tricky position as well because they might be paying off drug debts or have their address targeted. They don’t know whether to report their child if they go missing.
“We go in and try to support them and make things clear in terms of how to best support their young person and also themselves,” Fuller says.
With young people between 14 to 16 the highest referred age group, the split between the number of boys and girls being referred has changed significantly over the last few years. Fuller says when the service worked solely with CSE victims, young males only made up around 15 per cent of referrals.
The ratio changed when the service expanded to include those affected by CCE, with figures for male referrals increasing to 25 per cent in the first year and to 39 per cent by the end of the second year.
“As it currently stands, referrals of girls are outnumbering those for boys and CSE referrals are greater than those [for] criminal exploitation. When we do have CCE referrals there’s often a high risk around those young people too due to things like retaliation and threats to themselves and their family,” Fuller says.
The onset of the pandemic last year forced the CARE team to think more creatively about how to engage with young people being referred into the service.
This meant moving away from tried and tested methods such as engaging at school or home or finding an activity they might be interested in.
“Once we were able to do telephone and virtual support, we were able to put a robust risk assessment in early and legitimately say why we needed to see these young people as they were high risk individuals,” says Fuller.
“We saw them outside and went for walks and I think that’s why we’ve seen such a high level of referrals continuing to come in during the pandemic and not much of a drop.”
A further strength to her team lies in their ability to work with these young people from a trauma-informed perspective.
Each member has undergone specialist training in this area and many of them have come from a counselling background.
“A lot of these young people feel quite shameful and guilty, asking themselves why they didn’t say no or why they didn’t act in a certain way and being able to understand the impact of this trauma has been a huge benefit throughout our service,” adds Fuller.
IMPACT
CARE uses an outcome assessment tool called My Wheel to evaluate the impact of its work which covers aspects such as “safety”, “family” and a young person’s “hopes and aspirations”.
An assessment is done at the start to score the young person regularly throughout the support offered and once the intervention has finished.
Fuller says 83 per cent of the young people the service has worked with show an active improvement in at least one of the areas on My Wheel.
The highest scoring improvement is around “safety” followed by “hopes and aspirations” indicating a young person is starting to think about the future and what they could achieve, she adds.
More recently, the service has also been using a retrospective outcome wheel around three months after the intervention has finished.
While Fuller admits it is still a small pool of data, emerging results from this evaluation show that 91 per cent of young people say there has been further improvement in their safety after the service had stopped supporting them.
She says: “We often hear feedback that CARE gave that young person someone to talk to and that’s so important for them knowing that we exist outside of other services and can give them a clear plan of recovery.”
NATIONAL PROGRAMMES ON EXPLOITATION AND ABUSE INVOLVING THE CHILDREN’S SOCIETY
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The Prevention Programme is funded by the Home Office. It brings together regional and national partners from across England and Wales and supports them to improve understanding of and responses to tackling and preventing child sexual abuse and exploitation, child criminal exploitation, modern slavery and human trafficking.
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The Disrupting Exploitation programme works with agencies including police, social care, schools, youth offending teams, businesses, faith groups and community organisations in London, Birmingham and Greater Manchester. It works to change the systems around young victims of exploitation to create wider impact. Through sharing of insight, young people’s experiences and best-practice, and delivering training, awareness raising and driving collaboration, the programme helps key organisations to prevent and disrupt all forms of child exploitation including child sexual exploitation. It is funded largely by The National Lottery Community Fund as well as by local authorities, a violence reduction unit and a grant from a generous philanthropist.
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The Children’s Society is part of a consortium, delivering the Tackling Child Exploitation Support Programme alongside Research in Practice and the University of Bedfordshire. The programme, funded by the Department for Education, works intensively with local partnerships to offer tailored help to develop effective strategic responses to child exploitation and risks of harm from outside the family home.
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Support Rethought pilot programme, funded by the Home Office, operates in Devon, Nottinghamshire and Newcastle/Gateshead. It offers support to children and young people and their parent/carer within six weeks of them reporting they have been sexually abused or exploited. The service is also working to bring together experts from across the country to share insights about the abuse children are experiencing and to discuss improvements to the ways in which agencies work together.