Lack of family support leaves more teenagers open to explotiation, Anne Longfield warns
Joe Lepper
Wednesday, March 2, 2022
A lack of family support is leaving thousands of teenagers at increased risk of exploitation, grooming and violence, according to former children’s commissioner for England Anne Longfield.
A reduction in services is also leading to more children from all backgrounds being taken into care, she says.
A report from Longfield's Commission on Young Lives has found that teenagers from all backgrounds are at risk of harm due to a breakdown in help available to families caused by funding cuts over the last decade.
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This is leading to a “conveyor belt of vulnerable children available to county lines, gangs and abusers”, she warned.
Longfield criticised the children’s social care system for being blighted by “a blizzard of bureaucracy and assessment forms”, involving multiple referrals and “tick box assessments” that are leaving families feeling that “services are being done to them rather than with them”.
Families living in poverty, with mental illness, addiction issues, as well as domestic violence are among the hardest hit by cuts to support.
Longfield’s A New Partnership with Families report adds that “many of these stresses are felt particularly acutely by black, brown and minority ethnic children”. She wants to see a specific strategy for supporting these groups of children.
An increase in more affluent families struggling to access support is also noted by Longfield.
This includes middle class families unable to get help during crises, such as finding a burner phone, unexplained money or weapons in their children’s bedrooms.
“We heard how sometimes parents call the police and social services desperate for help, only to be told that this does not exist or to be given ineffective responses and/or contradictory advice,” says her report.
Parents taking part in the report also felt they were forced to become “instant experts” on issues around grooming and county lines.
Longfield said: “Government’s ambition must be for a new partnership with families that provides statutory services, and charitable groups with the armoury they need to fight back.
“If we help and support parents, we make it harder for children to be groomed, coerced, exploited and harmed. Those who seek to exploit children know it and policymakers and services need to catch up fast.”
We've published the Commission's second thematic report calling for a new partnership with families to safeguard vulnerable teenagers and divert them away from serious violence, county lines and exploitation.
— Commission on Young Lives (@coyl2022) March 2, 2022
How can we do it? https://t.co/oB9lTepmp3
Among cuts criticised by Longfield is the “historic mistake” of reducing funding for Sure Start centres. She warns that government plans for family hubs to be set up to offer support “are nowhere near ambitious enough”.
She wants to see family hubs rolled out in every disadvantaged area initially. Long term these should be launched in over 3,000 communities, which formerly had a Sure Start centre. Each of these hubs should have a specialist “teenager at risk” service available to families.
A legal duty on councils to deliver early intervention is also needed, said Longfield.
Other recommendations include greater partnerships between children's services with charities and community groups and a focus on practical, long-term help, with families involved in designing support.
An extension of kinship care to support teenagers at risk of harm as well as reallocated unspent tutoring funding to recruit school attendance workers is also needed.
In addition, the government needs to re-launch the Child Poverty Unit, which it disbanded in 2016, with a cross government poverty reduction plan published by April 2023.
Children’s Society policy manager Iryna Pona backs Longfield’s recommendation for a wider roll out of family hubs to support families of teenagers at risk of exploitation.
“But these should be just one part of a huge package of government investment in children’s social care to help rebuild early intervention services ravaged by years of funding cuts,” she said.
“Any child in any community can be vulnerable to being groomed and subjected to horrific criminal exploitation for county lines drug dealing and other crimes.
“Yet too often, shortcomings in resources and understanding mean children and their parents or carers do not get the support they need.
“Whatever their background or age, much more needs to be done to ensure young people get early help with vulnerabilities perpetrators target, like poverty, mental health issues and domestic abuse,” Pona added.