We are delighted to announce our next NWG Annual Conference on Thursday 5 March 2026, 10am – 3pm

We are happy to announce Keynote Speaker:

Temporary Chief Constable Becky Riggs: NPCC Lead for Child Protection and Abuse Investigation 

Temporary Chief Constable Becky Riggs brings more than three decades of distinguished policing experience to her leadership of Staffordshire Police. Her career – spanning Dorset, Hampshire, the Metropolitan Police, and the City of London Police – reflects a deep commitment to public service, operational excellence, and the protection of the most vulnerable. 

Throughout her 30 years in policing, Becky has built an exceptional track record in some of the most complex and challenging areas of law enforcement. She is widely respected for her expertise in child protection, counter‑terrorism investigations, safeguarding, and intelligence-led responses to fraud and serious harm. 

Her operational leadership has placed her at the forefront of major national incidents, including the London Bridge terror attack and the Grenfell Tower disaster. In these moments of profound challenge, Becky played a critical role in ensuring coordinated, compassionate, and highly effective policing responses that put communities and victims at the centre.

 In 2024, Becky was appointed the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Lead for Child Protection, Abuse and Investigations, reflecting her long-standing dedication to improving outcomes for vulnerable children. In this national role, she leads system-wide efforts to strengthen investigative standards, enhance multi‑agency safeguarding, and deliver lasting cultural change across policing to improve the safety and wellbeing of children across the UK. 

Now serving as Temporary Chief Constable of Staffordshire Police, Becky continues to champion integrity, professionalism, and inclusion. Her leadership is defined by a relentless focus on public trust, victim-centred policing, and empowering frontline officers and staff to deliver outstanding service.

 Driven by purpose and grounded in experience, Becky Riggs is a transformative leader whose career embodies the values of modern policing, putting people first, protecting the vulnerable, and shaping safer futures for communities across the country.

Threat Leadership, National Crime Agency
Rob Richardson – Deputy Threat Lead CSA

Rob leads project RHYOBASALT which is the national response to the Com Network threat. The projects seeks to bring together a coherent response across law enforcement, safeguarding partnerships, industry, academia and the third sector to deliver a public health approach to this new harmful threat.

All agencies are likely to come across potential indicators of harm. Awareness raising amongst education and health colleagues as well as responding agencies is key to preventing com network activity and early identification.

What are Com Networks? Community ‘Com’ Networks are online groups involved in child sexual abuse, cybercrime and offline violence. These networks are dynamic and often overlap across the threats, although not every case will involve all three.

The majority of those involved (victims and perpetrators) are predominantly but not always children under the age of 18. Members of the Com Network engage with deviant beliefs, behaviours, and offending. Offenders engage in all forms of extreme behaviour, and seek kudos by performing the most severe acts of degrading sexual and physical violence and engendering the greatest fear in their victims. Com Networks are active on virtually all social media and online gaming platforms but primarily operate on Discord and Telegram which are popular communication platforms.

Definition

Com Networks can be defined as: Transnational Virtual Networks (TVN) of criminal actors which engage in a variety of illegal acts or coerce others to do so in furtherance of their own personal gain, development of their infamy, or in furtherance of their ideologies.

Phil Ashford – National Child Sexual Exploitation Development Coordinator – Hydrant Programme/Child Sexual Exploitation Taskforce

After spending 7 years working on safer neighbourhood teams, Phil gained more than 10 years’ experience working to tackle child sexual exploitation CSE, starting as a multi-agency CSE service manager in a large metropolitan area. During that time he helped manage a significant trial involving multiple victims and offenders.

Phil went on to spend three years as the Operational Lead for the Department of Education-funded CSE Response Unit, providing strategic and operational support to professionals working to address CSE. Prior to joining the CSE Taskforce, Phil worked for the Home Office-funded Vulnerability, Knowledge and Practice Programme. Phil is now the National CSE Development Coordinator for the CSE Taskforce, a Home Office-funded project supporting police forces across England & Wales. Phil has been recognised nationally for his work with the hospitality industry to prevent child sexual exploitation through partnership approaches.

Missing People: The links between missing and CSE, and good practice in preventing repeat episodes. Josie Allan – Head of Policy and Partnership, Missing People in partnership with Angelique Vassell – Founder, WalkWithMe UK.

This session will explore how exploitation can be a driver and consequence of missing episodes; how exploitation can be identified in the response to missing episodes; and a deep dive into one service example that has worked in disrupting exploitation and patterns of repeat missing.

Josie is the Head of Policy and Partnerships for Missing People and has led their policy work since 2016. She has worked with previously missing adults, children and their families to campaign for a better response when anyone is reported missing, and for improvements in the support provided when people return from missing.

Recent work has focused on the response for care-experienced children, including leading consultation with young people from across the country, and supporting the development of the Children Missing from Care Framework. Other projects include campaigns to challenge inequities in the response to missing people from marginalised ethnic communities; developing guidance for professionals working with unaccompanied children who are at risk of going missing; and influencing national police policy development.

Manchester Metropolitan University: Understanding complexities in child exploitation response
Michelle McManus – Professor in Safeguarding and Violence Prevention and Co-Director of the Institute for Children’s Futures (ICF).

Her expertise is in multi-agency safeguarding arrangements, working across systems, people and organisations to improve responses and make communities safer. Her work examines all forms of exploitation, but with particularly focus on child abuse and exploitation, including CSE, CCE, County Lines, as well as Domestic Abuse and Sexual Abuse.

Her portfolio includes a Thematic Review of Adult Practice Reviews (APRs) and Child Practice Reviews (CPRs) in Wales and a large multi-site evaluation of multi-agency safeguarding responses across lived experience, data and practitioners: Shaping the Future of Safeguarding in Wales – funded by the National Independent Safeguarding Board (NISB) Wales.

This has led the development of various outputs, such as The Collective Safeguarding Responsibility Model: 12Cs, which is cited in the MASH guiding principles to enable multi-agency safeguarding teams to identify and assess their effectiveness.

Her work has also seen the publication of written evidence for the Children’s Social Care Inquiry, providing oral evidence in Parliament, with additional evidence published by the House of Lords to maximise the utilisation of the Modern Slavery Act legislation in county lines investigations. Recent research, commissioned by DfE, explored Rec. 9 from the National Casey Audit, examining the recording practices of CSAE in children’s social care. Other relevant work includes analysis of Annual Safeguarding Partnership Reports for DfE, and the largest qualitative study on safeguarding partnership responses to county lines and serious youth violence (commissioned by Home Office and DfE).

Michelle also co-created the original Kent Internet Risk Assessment Tool (KIRAT), an intelligence tool used by law enforcement agencies in prioritising those indecent image offenders most likely to be contact sexually abusing children. The KIRAT tool is used across 24 EU countries, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

CSA Centre: Summary of publications
Emilie Smeaton – Associate Principal Research and Evaluation Officer, Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse

This session will explore the latest publication in the CSA Centre’s Key messages from research series, which brings together the most up-to-date research into quick-read and accessible online overviews, to guide confident professional practice.

To be published in late January 2026, Key messages from research on child sexual exploitation (second edition) integrates research published in the last eight years to help professionals respond to the significant number of children and young people who need support right now, and is aimed at anyone whose role brings them into contact with children and young people who have been sexually exploited or are at risk of sexual exploitation, or with those at risk of or who have sexually exploited children.

The report’s author, Emilie, is a consultant researcher and evaluator who has worked nationally and internationally to support development of an evidence-base addressing child sexual exploitation and other forms of child abuse and exploitation. She is currently an Associate Principal Research and Evaluation Officer with the CSA Centre. 

Emilie is an author of numerous publications in this field and also supports practice, policy and strategic developments through utilising evidence. She also provides training and support around trauma-informed research, evaluation and practice and promoting cultural competency.

NHS: A trauma informed response to CE
Dr Romana Farooq – NHS Childhood Trauma, Adversity & Exploitation: Implications for Evidence & Practice

Dr Romana Farooq is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist in Tier 4 Inpatient CAMHS and a Specialist Alternative to Hospital Service for children and young people.

She is also Academic Director on the Newcastle Doctorate in Clinical Psychology Programme. She was awarded the British Psychological Society Early Career Award for outstanding contributions to Clinical Psychology in respect of her work with children and young people subject to sexual exploitation.

She received this award within 3 years post qualification. Romana specialises in working with children, young people and their families who are subject to human rights violations, child exploitation, trafficking, modern day slavery, forced criminality, gangs and harmful sexual behaviour.

Romana has been involved in shaping, developing and delivering services for children and young people subject to sexual exploitation, sexual violence or displaying harmful sexual behaviour.

Romana has also worked in a range of locked and secure settings such as the Children and Young People Secure Estate as well as Forensic CAMHS. She has developed a keen interest and passion for working with diverse communities and speaks regularly on inclusivity and the importance of inclusive leadership.

She has spent over 10 years working with grassroots communities, marginalised groups and disenfranchised youth. Providing organisational consultancy, development and change in respect of working with complex systems. She currently is an Expert Member of the Child Exploitation Parliamentary Advisory Group and Theres No Place Like Home Advisory Group.

Sian Morrison – Third-year trainee clinical psychologist

Sian Morrison is a third-year trainee clinical psychologist on the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology programme at the University of Hull. She is currently on placement with Dr Romana Farooq, where her work is informed by community psychology approaches.

She has a strong commitment to advocating for marginalised and racialised communities and to psychologically informed work that recognises the impact of social context and inequality.  

‘Where is CSE in 2025?’ Briefing Paper
In preparation for National CE Awareness Day on 18th March 2026, we would like to share with you our ‘Where is CSE in 2025?’ Conference Summary which includes key themes discussed at the event. Read the briefing paper here

Discount on Group bookings available – get 10% off for groups on 5-10 attendees