In this issue: 

• Exploitation and Transition
• Supporting Safeguarding 
• Safeguarding 
• Sports and Activities
• Prevention and Disruption
• Training
• Network Activity

Exploitation and Transition – Steve Baguley

The NWG continues to hold virtual meetings with local area exploitation leads and partners across the country. The main purpose of these meetings is to continue to share practice, research learning and resources etc. These meetings have been well received and will continue over the coming months. We have also been holding a number of virtual sharing workshops and these continue with North Yorkshire presenting their No Wrong Door approach on August 13th.

These workshops have proven to be very popular and have been oversubscribed, some are recorded and placed on the NWG website for members to access.

Following on from the focus group around the Missing Benchmarking Tool we will now be moving forward by piloting the use of the tool in a number of areas across England and Wales. These pilots will start in September and there will be updates through the NWG network and newsletter over the coming months.

The work on exploitation and the transition into adulthood continues. Following a meeting with the Chief Social Worker England the NWG will be holding an invite only workshop in September on exploitation and transition into adulthood.

A meeting took place with the Integrated Transition Team Lead for Birmingham who facilitated an excellent presentation on the new Preparation for Adulthood Integrated Transition Teams and has kindly agreed to deliver a workshop for the NWG hopefully in September. Special thanks also to Surrey Police for sharing their practice around the use of closure orders to keep vulnerable people safe. This was shared with the transition electronic network and added to the NWG website resources.

In the coming weeks a number of meetings are planned with local areas who want to examine and further develop their services around exploitation and the transition into adulthood which is very encouraging.

Safeguarding – Bina Parmar

This month, we have participated in several virtual seminars and webinars to gain a more informed insight into the impact of Covid on Safeguarding, in order to share this learning with practitioners attending our surgery sessions and requesting advice and support through other means. This included a seminar with Dr Warren Larkin on the impact of ACEs and also sharing practice events with partners of NWG, to learn more about safeguarding adolescents, keeping safe through risk assessments, online safety and the impact of Covid from an operational perspective.

Surgery sessions have included themes such as supporting at risk young people with ADHD and ASD, gang activity and criminal exploitation, trafficking, suitable residential placements, and the role of the education sector in safeguarding.

Sports and Activities – Kevin Murphy

During July  we were invited to participate in a webinar by UK Coaching, the main topic was a review of the Netflix documentary called Athlete A, this featured the USA gymnasts who were collectively abused by Dr Larry Nassar. The webinar was very well attended by sports coaches from across the country.

The NWG have maintained contact with our Safe to Play (S2P) partners as we wait direction from our partners about future launch dates when the current health situation has been fully assessed. I have assisted our S2P partners in Southend to write an article for their local media outlet regarding safeguarding in sport during the summer holidays, this was published in the region and also shared across the NWG social media platforms. We continue to meet with our safeguarding partners from Sport England including the ACT and Lime Culture as work is ongoing in the development of a new safeguarding course for designated officers and club welfare officers in sport. We are also working closely with colleagues from the CPSU to assist in the development and promotion of their Parents in Sport Week that will occur w/c Oct 6^th.

Prevention and Disruption – Kay Wallace

This month we commenced working on secondment for two and a half days a week on the Cesium project with Trilateral research and Lincolnshire Police. Identifying and tackling child exploitation is a complex task, yet a failure to do so effectively can result in devasting consequences for the victim, their families and society as a whole.

The hidden nature of CE necessitates a proactive approach.  Current safeguarding processes are primarily reactive and hindered by risk assessment tools and methods that lack evidential rigour and are costly in terms of human effort.

The wealth of information that police and safeguarding partners hold could provide key insights to support the early identification of harm to children. Proactively identifying hidden harm will enable earlier interventions to be implemented, thereby reducing the level of harm.
Cesium’s vision is to use cutting-edge machine learning techniques to identify children and locations most at risk of CE, as well as those most likely to perpetrate CE, both now and in the future in order to reduce harm and support the effective deployment and commissioning of safeguarding resources. The project is on course to be finalised at the end November 2020.

In relation to the work currently being undertaken with indirect victims of indecent images of children (IIOC) offenders (partners and children of the offenders), we have created two infographics for partners. The first is about mental and physical health and caring for themselves and their children, the second is factual information about the police investigation. we have also created a third infographic for police investigators to raise their awareness about their duty of care to offenders’ partners. The infographics will be stand-alone information sheets and will also be incorporated in the family pack, developed by Tarian ROCU.

Families and Communities – Maria Cassidy

The Families and Community Lead has spent the month liaising with projects to find out more about the impact and recovery post COVID 19 has had for families whose children have been exploited. Examples of practice are being pulled together of how organisations are being creative to continue contact with families as well as feedback from an area who has been piloting the Parents as Safeguarding Partners Benchmarking Tool and this will be shared with the network. The lead will also now be incorporating Youth Participation into her role as this has been a gap in the team and she has already devised a plan that will help to embed this area in NWGs work. The lead coordinates our new weekly surgery offer where areas can bring cases and receive a whole team response. These have been very well received and helpful for professionals and are available for anyone working in the field of exploitation.  Just email NWG to book your slot.

Surgery attendee quote:   “The professionals were very knowledgeable and provided us with the confidence that we are implementing the right approach.”

Training –Sarah Brown

Our trainer has returned from furlough this month on a part time basis and has spent time attended NWG webinars, taking learning from those events and reading new material around areas such as covid19, vicarious trauma and victim blaming in order to continue to refresh our training material.

New bitesize events/webinars have been planned  and scheduled using expertise from the NWG operational team ensuring these events are current to the workforce.

NWG held 4 shared learning events over July:

• Devon Adolescent Safety Framework
• Thinking about risk: messages from young people, practitioners and carers
• Maximising the learning from Covid-19 for future working practice
• Impact on families from sexual offending

All events proved very popular and were oversubscribed-  repeat events are planned to enable those on the waiting to attend.

Network/Membership  Activity – Cheryl Stevens & Jane Woods

We continue to add new resources to our website and currently have over 1,600 CE/CSE relevant resources available as well as updates from across the sectors on our latest news page

We have posted several new articles in our latest blog section including:

• WHAT IS IT LIKE BEING THE NON-OFFENDING PARTNER OF AN IIOC PERPETRATOR?
• ATHLETE A, IICSA INQUIRY, RADIO PODCAST;  CHILD ABUSE IN SPORT

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