NWG CEO Sheila Taylor MBE was invited on behalf of the NWG Network to the summit at No10 on March 3rd 2015 to discuss and unveil the new measures that will be used to protect children from sexual exploitation. The event was attended by victims and survivors groups, police chiefs, council leaders, health and social care professionals, and child protection experts.

 

This was our contribution to that meeting:

 

We thanked the Prime Minister for taking this issue seriously, as demonstrated by todays summit but there is a lot to do still, it is currently a work in progress and is a far greater problem than people believed when Operation Retriever became public knowledge, when we began to demonstrate the scale of the issue.

 

We talked about the third sector concerns and of seeing the concerns from a growing number of professionals in our network across the UK.

 

We said it is clear that the health needs of our victims and survivors is not in place, or even well-developed at this stage.

 

We spoke about the need for professionals to exercise curiosity and to explore the understanding of consent, among health practitioners, other practitioners and the young people themselves.

 

We reminded the summit that the identification of this serial rape of boys and girls is often shown through behaviour and not articulated verbally and talked about how we need to learn those signs, how we have to develop ways to talk to young people about something that is so traumatic its impossible for many to articulate.

 

Believing them has to be the starting point, access to trauma professionals that can assist them to talk about what has happened is essential, and not through a “come to the surgery at 11am for an hour, tell a stranger what happened, and if you miss three appointments you’re out” type of response, but one that is built to accommodate the needs of these young people.

 

We talked about how the need to address healthy sexual relationships within school settings is vital for those who may not understand consent as well as those who are vulnerable to becoming victims and to build resilience among those vulnerable individuals and advocated for a public health campaign as vital.

 

We explained, if you become a victim of a serious road accident, then you have access to acute  responses, trauma counselling, and rehabilitation centres and services, but the mental, physical and sexual trauma from sexual exploitation is not responded to equally. In some cases we are seeing young people being raped by 100’s of adults over a long period of time, in one case one young person was raped by over 90 adults in one weekend, where are the services that address that level of understanding or need?

 

We highlighted we are seeing investment from private sector and voluntary agencies into developing the trauma therapy, and there are many services delivering therapeutic programmes to adult survivors of sexual abuse that we can learn from.

 

We spoke of our colleagues in other countries where there are scientifically validated programmes for trafficked victims, we can learn from their investment in trauma services.

 

We cannot have, as in Rotherham 1400 children known to be victims not receiving help that allows them to reach their potential.

 

We made it very clear, if other areas ran the same scrutiny as Rotherham, then their figures are likely to be equal or greater.

 

We said  “the long-term outcomes as identified by Alexis Jay and replicated in international studies that psychosis, PTSD, eating disorders and self harming behaviour will have long-term impact across generations on the well-being of the victims and significant impact on treatment services.”

 

We spoke about how young women often find themselves pregnant, and with the lack of trauma services and the chaotic life’s they are immersed in can mean they risk their babies being removed at birth. We spoke about how this increased self harm and suicide attempts and how we continue to compound the trauma without investment in reducing what victims face, potentially a lifetime in adult mental and sexual health services.

 

Sheila Taylor CEO

 

NWG Network

 

More pictures from the summit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/16704122741/in/album-72157651080499866/

 

David Cameron spoke to the BBC about the child abuse summit.

 

David Cameron has used a summit at Number 10 to announce a wide range of measures intended to ensure that the child abuse scandals of the past do not get repeated. He said:

Today, I am sending an unequivocal message that professionals who fail to protect children will be held properly accountable and council bosses who preside over such catastrophic failure will not see rewards for that failure.

 

Offenders must no longer be able to use the system to hide their despicable activities and survivors of child sexual abuse must be given the long-term therapeutic treatment they need to re-build their lives. But it is not just about introducing new policies. It is about making sure that the professionals we charge with protecting our children – the council staff, police officer and social workers – do the jobs they are paid to do.

 

We owe it to our children, and to the children who survive horrific sexual abuse, to do better and ensure the mistakes of the past are never repeated again.

Here are the key points he made.

 

• Cameron said that he wanted to see a big change in attitudes towards child abuse.

 

The most important thing apart from all the policy changes and the legal changes is a big change in culture. We need to say loudly and clearly: abuse of children under the age of 16 is wrong – it’s not consent, it’s not normal relations, it’s wrong, and we have to be intolerant of it and not walk on by as happened in too many cases in the past.

 

• He rejected suggestions that extending the scope of the wilful neglect offence might discourage people from going into social work.

We’re doing great work to encourage good people into social work in the first place. We’re having an equivalent of Teach First into social work. At the end of the day if professionals fail there need to be consequences. One of the problems in Rotherham was that there was failure after failure by social workers, council officials and by the police and not enough consequences flowed from that.

 

• He rejected the idea that the government had not done enough on this.

 

I don’t accept that we haven’t done a lot about it: we have, we’ve put in place better police training, we’ve put in place longer sentences, more help for victims, a whole set of things. These events in Rotherham and Oxford have happened after the last manifesto was written. They’ve happened during this parliament and what I’m determined as Prime Minister is that we end the walk-on-by culture that too many police forces and social work departments have demonstrated.

 

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2015/mar/03