As always, our work is to assist departments and professionals at all levels to create the best response possible and to look for solutions to challenges we face when tackling the issue of child exploitation.

During Covid-19 we are working closely with our colleagues across all statutory and voluntary agencies.  The soft intelligence and emerging trends and challenges that you each face in your day to day work are shared with them to ensure they are being considered in strategic and operational developments to manage the threat of exploitation in these unprecedented times.  This will assist in creating an environment that safeguards our children, the sharing of practice in these unprecedented times is crucial.  We will of course feed this information to our colleagues in central government too, to assist in their understanding of the national picture as it develops.

As we are currently in lock down, it is expected that there will be changes to the way exploitation of young people is taking place, for example:

• how it is beginning to affect the ways you are working
• how you have changed your working practice
• how you are managing those who may be perpetrators in these challenging times
• the key messages you are sending out to ensure offenders get the message they will not get away with their actions
• changes to practice that are working well and are their further identified challenges
• Changes to the patterns of exploitation i.e. missing incidents
• Any other trends or emerging threats you may see

Please share them with us so we can collate the information and ensure those new and emerging trends and threats are fed into supporting colleagues across all agencies and government.

A number of resources have already been shared on our website, https://www.nwgnetwork.org/category/news/

We will also be sharing this practice through our website, to support the access to this we will be offering an introduction period of individual membership free until 30th June 2020 (individual membership only) – To take advantage of this offer go to https://www.nwgnetwork.org/register/ , 

Complete your details , select ‘pay by phone’ from the payment option and use the code COVID19 General in the description box. Once received your account will be activated until 30.06.2020 (no payment will be taken) , we will contact you again prior to the end of June to let you know the account is expiring