Please fine below an overview summary of the work that Cornerhouse undertake with young people in the Hull and East Yorkshire area. The summary highlights the importance of what a  healthy relationship is threaded throughout all their work and resources .

We work with young people both on a one to one and group work basis. The one to one work is aimed at children and young people at risk of CSE and the group work is around more preventative work or for children and young people who are very low risk of CSE. We also are a franchisee for the Tender project, which uses drama and play to education children around domestic abuse. A worker from the CARE (CSE) project does this with another member of staff, we find this links in well with our work and helps us network with the schools and young people. We have had a few CSE referrals on the back of this work. We have also been a part of the police and youth work led Wise Up and WisER which are general preventative groups aims at secondary school age.

We carry out education and diversionary work with the young people around what is CSE, grooming, how to identify these things and what makes people at risk of CSE. We also look further into trauma and how our body reacts to trauma when this is applicable. Throughout this work, the idea of what a healthy relationship is threaded in all of the resources and conversations. At the beginning on the work we focus on their existing relationships, whether this be with professionals, family, peers and romantic. We use this assessment to establish their view of what a healthy relationship is and what their current support system looks like. We then go into a healthy and unhealthy scenario based activity usually and then into grooming, cse etc. We then revisit healthy relationship work in looking at power and control, early warning signs of abuse. And depending on the young person and their situation we can use further activities and resources to explore domestic abuse. We find this works really well with our young people as we want to stop the risk of CSE but also instil healthy relationships for their future relationships, whether this be friendships or romantic. Unfortunately we see young people who leave exploitative situations end up in domestic abusive relationships, so we try to instil the learning from the off and deal with relationships as a holistic view rather than segmented between CSE and domestic abuse. In doing this we hope that the young person’s thought process when assessing risk looks at how that person makes them feel all around rather than what type of abuse is less traumatic. Having said this, I don’t want you to think I am demeaning that CSE and DA are separate issues, as they are and we very much work around CSE. But for us, safeguarding the children and young people from future abusive away from the CSE is of importance.

We are receiving a large number of referrals from 16 at the moment, so it’s really important we try to set them up for healthy relationships in the future.

To learn more about Cornerhouse go to their website.

http://www.wearecornerhouse.org/