Our Learning Journey — Stories of a Prevention Programme
The Children’s Society are proud to deliver the Prevention Programme, a national Programme working to prevent, disrupt and improve responses to child exploitation and abuse. Funded by the Home Office, we act as a catalyst to drive forward and accelerate new approaches to tackling child exploitation and abuse.
We share this blog to mark the launch of the evaluation of programme delivery during 2020–21. The Prevention Programme is a dynamic and evolving programme that thrives on collaboration and partnership working to prevent the abuse of children. We take an active learning approach and openly share key learning and insight from the programme. Please see the full evaluation for all the detail.
The Prevention Programme works towards an ambitious goal, a goal of preventing child exploitation and ensuring that every victim of this abuse is recognised and receives the right support. This aligns with The Children’s Society’s ambitious ten year goal to reverse the damaging decline in children’s wellbeing.
We know that children are forced to commit crime by those that groom and control them but are too often seen as criminals first and victims a distant second. We know that the very idea of ‘victimhood’ comes loaded with stereotypes and assumptions; that girls experience sexual abuse, boys criminal exploitation, black children are adultified and a crying, withdrawn young person is far more likely to be recognised and supported than an angry aggressive one, even though research tells us that anger is a common response to trauma.
But how do we change these approaches and perceptions? How do we convince those less aware and less involved such as businesses and the public to play a bigger role in spotting and reporting exploitation concerns or support police partners to change deeply ingrained patterns of working?
Emerging and adapting learning approaches
During 2019–20 delivery, we focused heavily on providing training to professionals — seeking to increase awareness of exploitation’s many forms, the interconnections between those different forms, and exploring and encouraging different practice responses to tackle it. However, as valuable as training can be to the individual, we began to question if it was the best and most sustainable way to achieve long-lasting change.
We work to try and change the systems around every child at risk of exploitation because we believe it is society’s responsibility to protect them and that it should never ask children to prevent their own abuse. Through working with the institutions and organisations that intersect these children’s lives, we aim to change how they behave in order to play a better role in preventing child exploitation and abuse.
In 2020 we began exploring what research tells us about how people learn and what most encourages us to make changes in our behaviour and practice. Across 2020–21 we have moved to a more in-depth, collaborative model of delivery. We have used facilitation approaches to create more collaborative, collectively-owned spaces. Where we work with partners to identify challenges, encourage critical thinking, understand causes, share insight, and supportively critique current and long-standing approaches while developing new solutions.
“I don’t think it would’ve happened to such extent where we are now without the programme. The efforts beforehand were a bit siloed, law enforcement tackling alone and that approach wasn’t overly successful in past. I can’t see how we would be in this current position where we’re partnership working, with a heavy focus on children and young people without this programme.” (Police Stakeholder, London)
This approach ensures more involvement from participants, and a greater level of ownership over any proposed changes, as suggestions are coming from within rather than externally.
Recognising the need for varied and adaptable ways of working, we also began using a range of other approaches including:
- Setting up exploitation champions networks and working groups
- Modelling different approaches to safeguarding
- Networking, relationship and connection making — drawing together people from across the national stakeholder network the programme connects with
- Challenging siloed working to encourage holistic approaches that see and respond to the whole child and all they may have experienced
- Acting as a bridge to bring together partners, sectors and geographies.
Amplifying emerging issues
The team have built extensive relationships across every region of England and Wales. Together we draw on the expertise and insights of external and internal exploitation leads, so that the Programme directly shares information and insight captured at a local and regional level upwards to inform national responses. This has been powerful in ensuring that emerging concerns and changes in exploitation patterns are shared in real-time, allowing partners to continually adapt and improve their responses. We know that perpetrators are always one step ahead, finding new ways to groom and exploit children while we run to catch up. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted this constant adaptation and the importance of the Programme responding rapidly through helping ensure that national responses to exploitation, abuse, and trafficking are led by the most up-to-date information from young people’s experiences.
“They have knowledge and links with other agencies that we don’t have as police. It’s like a match made in heaven. (Police Stakeholder, National role)
Persistence is key
We put children and young people at the heart of our work. No matter how many times we hear victim blaming language or see approaches placing the responsibility on children rather than adults to protect them from abuse, we continue to fight their corner. But crucially we do so respectfully, recognising where other perspectives are coming from, listening and learning and seeking to understand the unique challenges each partner or organisation may face in bringing about change.
Through consistent and persistent messaging about how children are groomed and impacted by exploitation and why it’s crucial that everyone plays a role in safeguarding children, the Programme has made real inroads in ensuring that safeguarding and victim-centric approaches are central to preventing and disrupting exploitation, abuse and organised crime.
Expanding reach and influence
Over the past year we have reached and worked with sectors not traditionally involved in safeguarding responses to children and young people such as the finance and banking sector, retail and hospitality and organisations across the transport industry. Through providing simple and clear messaging for these partners, and practical actions that staff within them can take we are able to make complex issues accessible with a clear ask that partners feel able to commit to.
As an example of this we worked with the Institute for Couriers, a membership body which represents a huge range of delivery companies to provide messaging for delivery drivers on the key role they can play in spotting and reporting child exploitation and abuse concerns when at the door of family homes. Reaching this audience was vital during the COVID-19 pandemic as the majority of sexual abuse takes place within the family home, and while in lockdown delivery drivers may have been the only professionals with sight of these children. Through developing posters, leaflets and newsletters with clear, simple advice and asks of this audience we experienced significant engagement with materials downloaded 3,500 times in one week alone.
We have learned that using training and accessible learning and campaign materials as a ‘hook’ into certain organisations can help initiate partnerships and longer-term, more in depth work. Our award winning #LookCloser campaign and its associated materials have acted as this vital hook into different areas and organisations, particularly with private sector businesses such as Uber, Deliveroo, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and Barclays Bank. The campaign goes from strength to strength, reaching millions of people in the last year, with a rapidly growing range of businesses adopting the campaign. This has shown that these audiences are receptive to clear messaging that is easy to implement, about child exploitation and how they can play a part preventing it.
COVID-19 challenges and opportunities
The COVID-19 pandemic has created many barriers and challenges across all aspects of life, including within the Prevention Programme. Lack of face-to-face working meant we could not create the conditions for unplanned opportunities and conversations to spark. However. opportunities have been created, opportunities to innovate have emerged, and new ways of working have been stimulated. For example, the shift to remote working has enabled the Programme to reach large numbers of people from multiple different organisations and areas of England and Wales.
The nationwide shift to remote working also enabled greater collaboration across regions and agencies, breaking down geographical and sector boundaries. The Programme has been more easily able to encourage partners to collaborate across geographical locations, as meetings and events are now much more accessible.
Resource, capacity, and demand in statutory sectors was a challenge before COVID-19, and in many cases was exacerbated during this time. However, the rapid societal changes also encouraged such statutory partners to set up new working groups and forums to provide opportunities for professionals from different backgrounds to contribute insights into how perpetrators were adapting. Through regular attendance at such meetings, the Prevention Programme was able to share and learn new and emerging insights, while helping shape statutory partners’ responses at a far quicker pace than ever before.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light many issues that may previously have been hidden, with partners acutely aware of young people’s safety. Patterns of exploitation in some instances became more apparent. For example, children who were being exploited and moved on trains became much more visible. This presented an opportunity and increased demand for the Programme’s support, as partners were keen to ensure that they delivered the best approaches to safeguarding children and young people during this time.
Looking ahead
As lockdown restrictions ease and we adjust to the new and adapted ways of living and working, new child exploitation patterns are beginning to emerge and it is crucial that we remain alert to these changes., We must continue to share them with one another at speed and ensure that programmes like ours remain agile, able to pivot to respond to new concerns which may have been hidden from view until now.
It is also vital that we remain receptive to learning, recognising that no one person or programme has all the answers and that it is only though true partnership and collaboration across all sectors and geographical areas that we can prevent child exploitation and build a society which allows this and future generations of children to flourish.
To read the full evaluation of our Prevention Programme please visit https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/information/professionals/resources/prevention-programme-evaluation.
This blog was written alongside ‘The possibilities of measuring systems change impact’ published by Chloe Nelson and available here.
Thanks to Chloe Nelson and Nerys Anthony for their contributions and support with writing this blog.
We are on a journey with this work and are always learning and developing our thinking and approaches. We are really keen to talk this through further and to hear and learn from others. If that is of interest or you would like to explore working in partnership with the Prevention Programme please get in touch and email James.Simmonds-Read@childrenssociety.org.uk
If you would like to follow more of the journey of the programme, head to https://twitter.com/TCSImpact
