The sessions I have attended/viewed this week at the Programme of Learning & Development have been both interesting and useful! And if I may say well facilitated by you and your team, and Rebecca, very well managed/supported by your team. Kudos to all, my experience has been a very professional and high-quality event with another day to go!

Over the next 2 days we will continue to share lots of links to resources, useful documents, reports and other interesting items, so keep an eye out for those on our website, our round-up of events and social media.

Please do send us any links to resources that you use that may be useful to others too, we can include them even if you are unable to attend the event.

It’s not too late to register and join us for the next 2 days and it is possible to register at any time to see the recordings for the whole week.

Our first speaker today was

Ben Davies

Inadequate to Outstanding: Learning from successfully changing our culture and approach to working with young people

Ben is a registered social worker (20+ years) and is Service Director for Cornwall’s Children and Family Services which in November 2019 was rated ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted placing them in the top 10% of children’s social care services nationally.

One of the most important areas of change has been Cornwall’s culture and approach to working with young people at risk of exploitation. In this session, Cornwall will share learning from this successful journey of improvement.

This session is more about the practical application of how Cornwall adjusted their culture and less about the exploitation of children and young people and how you don’t always need a budget to do it.

Whilst Cornwall has a high tourism area it also has high levels of deprivation.

Ben talked about how strong leadership allowed and encouraged culture change.

Making an investment in youth services has assisted in early help, but many areas have lost youth services.

Sukhdev Rathore and Pav Kaur

Introduction to EDI and Faith Projects- NWG Networking session

Both Pav and Sukhdev joined the NWG recently to work on Exploitation in Diversity, Inclusion and faith organisations. We are delighted to introduce them to you today and talk about the work they will be undertaking.

Faith, inclusion, and diversity should underpin everything we do with regard to safeguarding children and young people. This should be a priority for us all and make it better for us to understand the impact of Child Exploitation.

We aim to provide practitioners with greater access to support and guidance to enable them to better engage with children and families from marginalised groups including those from Black Asian and Minority Ethnic communities, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender + and Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

And with our Faith work, we aim to raise awareness, knowledge and capacity amongst faith leaders and their designated safeguarding leads to prevent child sexual abuse and exploitation within all faith communities.

There is an opportunity to join the online forum and networks for these specific areas of work and the contact details for them both are [email protected] and [email protected]

Dr Rebecca Dunn and Dr Sophia King

Victim and survivor voices; experiences of child sexual abuse as told to the Truth Project

Dr Rebecca Dunn is Senior Head of Research and Analytics, IICSA: a government researcher with an academic and applied background in psychology and mental health, with a strong focus on qualitative and mixed methods. In her most recent government role in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Rebecca has worked as a Senior Researcher leading the final research reports with qualitative from the Truth Project.

Dr Sophia King is a Senior Researcher, IICSA: Whilst working as a Principal Research Officer at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Sophia designed and led research on child sexual abuse from accounts shared with the Inquiry’s Truth Project, and later was responsible for the Inquiry’s entire research and analytics programme.

The Truth Project, which concluded in October 2021, gave more than 6,000 victims and survivors of child sexual abuse an opportunity to share their experiences with the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

Today covered the experiences of child sexual abuse, experiences of professionals and institutions, and disclosure detection and response.

Overrepresentation of females took part in the research, we feel there is still an under presentation of males today.

The stats show that we really need to focus on early recognition and intervention.

Our work shows that the issues in sports are still really low figures for sports locations

NWG has picked up the key messages from the IICSA Faith report and appointed Pav to lead on our Faith work and continue to work with Sport and Leisure and we have created a forum for those working with LAC, contact Maria [email protected] who will support you in your work.

Victim blaming and language are so important and are now being recognised.

Victims believing they were in a relationship is still the same difficulty today that practitioners are faced with.

Dr Judy Eaton

Sexual Exploitation Risk in Autistic Young People

Dr Eaton is a clinical psychologist with a special interest in Autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions in both children and adults and is also a Research Associate at Kings College, London. Currently working independently and managing a large team of clinicians, including Clinical and Educational Psychologists, Speech and Language, and Occupational Therapists.

Judy and her team are regularly commissioned by NHS commissioners to carry out assessments on highly complex young people.

Writing a book entitled ‘A Guide to Mental Health Issues in Girls and Young Women on the Autism Spectrum: Diagnosis, Intervention and Family Support’ which is published by Jessica Kingsley Publications.

Working on the sexual exploitation risk in Autistic young people she is currently engaged in writing another book with colleagues in health and social care, specifically examining ‘complex and perplexing’ presentations in autistic children and adults which is due to be published in December 2022. https://help4psychology.co.uk/team/dr-judy-eaton/

Autism does not just affect girls, we recognise that there is a significant representation of young men with autistic traits in cases of criminal exploitation.

Judy went through the key signs of Autism in Females to help practitioners to spot the signs and reminded us that those with autistic traits are so vulnerable to being drawn into exploitation.

Dr Judy explained

• how complex autism traits manifest themselves.
• The specific difficulties of moving from children’s to adult services.

NWG is going to develop an information guide with Judy which will be available for our members so please look out for that.