Local democracy

Agenda item

ARRANGEMENTS BY THE COUNCIL AND ITS PARTNERS TO TACKLE CHILD SEXUAL EXPLOITATION

Previous Reference:  Minute 51 (2017/18)

 

The Interim Strategic Director, Children’s Services will submit Document “V” which provides an update to the report presented to the Bradford East Area Committee on the 15th February 2018 regarding the issue of child sexual exploitation (CSE). It sets out the arrangements that have been put in place, and which continue to develop, to safeguard children from CSE.

 

Recommended-

 

That the update report be noted.

 

                                                                        (Mark Griffin – 01274 434361)

 

 

Minutes:

Previous Reference:  Minute 51 (2017/18)

 

The Interim Strategic Director, Children’s Services submitted Document “V” which provided an update to the report presented to the Bradford East Area Committee on the 15th February 2018 regarding the issue of child sexual exploitation (CSE). It set out the arrangements that had been put in place, and which continued to develop, to safeguard children from CSE.

 

The Manager of the Children’s Safeguarding Board reported that CSE remained a focus for Bradford Council and its partners, he reported that since the last report, progress had been achieved in improving the response to CSE in the following ways:

 

·         The recently published Working Together legislation would result in changes to safeguarding arrangements nationally and partners were considering the local impact.

·         Production and finalisation of the Strategic Response to CSE.

·         Development of a CSE action plan in support of the Strategic Response.

·         Appointment of a new Local Authority CSE analyst.

·         Continued review around the CSE Team and operational functionality.

·         Continued development of the monthly CSE Operational meeting to complement daily activity and the strategic CSE Sub-group.

·         Bradford was successful in gaining Home Office funding for Trusted Relationships to provide additional support to vulnerable children.

·         Strategic Boards were now working together to tackle other complex safeguarding themes such as criminal exploitation, organised crime and modern day slavery.

·         Innovative methods of raising awareness through Safeguarding Stories, Mr Shape Shifter, Somebody’s Sister and Somebody’s Daughter.

·         A District Communications Group now existed to provide practitioners, parents, carers, children and communities with proactive, innovative and consistent approaches to communications.

·         Children’s Services had appointed its first Social Media Apprentice to create stronger and more effective links with children and young people.

·         The District Digital Safeguarding Group would develop and deliver a Digital Safeguarding strategy and it was intended to develop a virtual hub, aimed at practitioners and the community.

·         Bradford District Police Cyber Team continued to deliver training around on-line safety within the educational sector.

·         Partners were coordinating a District wide approach to support schools in Bradford to meet the Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) needs of  young people.

·         Public Health was now taking a higher profile role within CSE and had developed a specific Public Health offer to support CSE work across the district.

·         The BSCB (Bradford Safeguarding Children’s Board) had developed detailed audit tools to ensure organisations and schools had appropriate safeguarding arrangements in place.

He reported that Appendix 3 to the report provided statistics relating to Bradford East; Bradford East featured highly for children at risk of CSE; more referrals were being received; in relation to crime data Bradford East was not the highest and lower than other areas; Bradford East had the third highest number of perpetrators; Eccleshill, Bolton and Undercliffe and Bradford Moor were wards of most concern in Bradford East; the focus of activity was to look at developing knowledge of risk and addressing areas of concern.

 

The Chair of the CSE Missing Sub Group reported that Bradford District Police Cyber Team had started in 2015 and that Police staff delivered training around on-line safety.

 

Since the beginning of the 2017-2018 academic year, they had been working hard to continue establishing themselves in the educational sector as well as targeting establishments that had key connections to early intervention, safeguarding and other various vulnerabilities. From the work that had been completed so far this academic year, the highlights were:

 

·         31,656 children educated on eSafeguarding from 1115 separate sessions, above the recommended target.

·         54 vulnerable children received one to one safeguarding visits with their parents/carers also present.

·         5087 members of the community from different groups were delivered training from 184 separate sessions. These groups included NHS staff, Teachers, CAHMS staff, Internal Officers, Social workers and child-minders.

·         2376 parents educated about the dangers of the online world and how to help safeguard their children, through 128 different parent workshops

She reported that the one key area that the team wanted to improve on was the amount of parent workshops delivered and the amount of parents attending these presentations.  The team recognised challenges and were working with schools and parents to address this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Advanced Youth Service Practitioner for Bradford East reported on the work undertaken with young people which was detailed in Appendix 3 and included the Springfield and Greenwood Girls Group which was set up in response to inappropriate sexualised behaviour displayed by girls as young as 12 including social media, inappropriate clothing and conversations about sexual activity. The Groups offered a safe space to explore identity through activity and conversation; Bradford East Girls Nights in and Boys Night in which were both single gender sessions with a focus on self care and taking responsibility; Bradford East worked with LGBTQ and Young People – the Youth Service ran age appropriate groups for LGBTQ and young people which provided a safe environment to meet, socialise and engage in group work that explored issues that affected the LGBTQ and young people.

 

Members commented on a number of issues which included:

·         This report had been received a few times in the same format; with the first part including the work that was being undertaken, the second part including statistics; it would be helpful for Members to know how the work being undertaken was informed by statistics; was it a strategic response to why certain activities were being undertaken?

·         It was disappointing that Hanson and Immanuel had not taken up the offer of CSE preventative work (Somebody’s Sister, Somebody’s Daughter); young victims lived in those areas.

·         Some victims were being targeted outside of the Wards they lived in.

·         Why was it that historically there had been more perpetrators from the Pakistani community? Needed to look at why this was the case and what was causing a certain community to offend more than others? Needed to know why this was happening so that it could be prevented; more needed to be undertaken to identify why a certain proportion of grooming perpetrators in Bradford came from the Pakistani community; the most recent figures into grooming investigations showed that out of all recent CSE cases investigated in the past 39 per cent of perpetrators were British Pakistani.

·         Members had seen the report a number of times before but it did not show clear links on how efforts to tackle CSE were informed by statistics on victims and perpetrators.

·         More focussed work needed to be undertaken with certain communities.

·         Why were so many victims of CSE white/British?

·         What had been learnt and what do we know about these young women; children being excluded from schools was not helpful; a young person attending a Pupil Referral Unit had to travel through the City Centre to get to it; not appropriate to exclude vulnerable children and place them in Pupil Referral Units.

·         Impact of Children’s Services Ofsted judgement indicated that the authority was receiving more low level referrals but more was being undertaken in medium and higher risk cases; were low level referrals being missed?

·         What happened to children that were placed in other parts of the Country?

·         What about young people with learning disability and how was work undertaken with those vulnerable groups?

·         What about historic cases going back more than 1 to 2 years?

·         How did the Service engage with vulnerable children and adults who were not involved in any programme?

·         Needed the Interim Strategic Director of Children’s Services to attend a future meeting to explain what was being undertaken to protect children in the Authority’s care.

·         What work was being undertaken to educate teenage boys?

·         What about exploitation of young people within faith communities?

·         There were communities where the cultural stance took more priority than reporting and they had to get past the idea that reporting would bring shame on the community or family.

In response to the above comments the Manager of the Safeguarding Board and the Police representative reported that:

·         Non recent cases were over a year old and were classed as historic; anything within a year was classed as recent; recent data indicated that the ethnicity of perpetrators was now more evenly spread; historically there had been more Asian perpetrators.

·         A lot of work was being undertaken with certain communities to raise awareness of CSE.

·         It was difficult to explain why there had been a high proportion of perpetrators from a certain ethnic community, it could be a number of things such as money, gratification, opportunity etc.

·         Ethnicity was no longer a taboo subject; more work needed to be undertaken within certain communities.

·         A scoping exercise was undertaken to review historic cases and whether people were victims of CSE which led to operation Dalesway.

·         Cases over 1 to 2 year old were being looked at.

·         Partners were learning more and more in terms of different methods of interacting with young people such as social media; learning more about the opportunity to prevent and raise awareness of CSE at a young age; relationship and sex education were being taught earlier in school; the earlier the work was undertaken the earlier it could be prevented; work was being undertaken with Children’s Services – child placed into care could be vulnerable due to other activity; recognising the environment they had been put in; trying to keep children within the authority.

·         If a child was placed out of the authority, that authority would receive all the necessary information about that child; if a child came into Bradford then Bradford would be provided with all the information relating to that child.

 

·         More work was being undertaken around self esteem, correlation between sexual exploitation and criminal exploitation; targeting activities much earlier; domestic abuse and children missing; things that had been learnt were informing activities that were being undertaken.

·         OFSTED did highlight CSE Missing work as good; the role of the Children’s Safeguarding Board would be to hold Children’s Services to account and provide scrutiny; the outcome of Children’s Services OFSTED did not impact on the work relating to CSE.

·         More targeted work was being undertaken with new and emerging communities.

·          A lot of work was being undertaken in schools about healthy relationships and acceptable sexual behaviour.

·         Good work was being undertaken to educate people how to spot the dangers of grooming.

In response to Members’ questions the Police representative stated that it was difficult to engage with parents who did not want to be involved and that it was a challenge, but where there was an opportunity then everything possible was undertaken to get them engaged.  Health Partners contributed to communicating with vulnerable children. In response to work around Muslim women, the Police worked on information they had and valued the support from the community, CSE was under reported in BME communities, any young person could become a victim or perpetrator from any ethnic background.

 

A Member stressed that certain communities were now taking the issue of CSE very seriously and were talking about it where as at one time they would not have done that; the community was no longer willing to brush the issue under the carpet and was now more readily reporting crimes committed by their community; local faith group leaders were doing sermons in mosques about anti social behaviour, drug dealing and CSE. Agencies needed to work with faith communities to get the message across to the community.

 

Members commended the good work that was being undertaken with voluntary organisations.

 

Resolved-

 

(1)          That the update report be noted and the interventions that were undertaken be welcomed.

 

(2)          That a further report be presented within the next six months providing more details on educational interventions at neighbourhood and ward-levels.

 

(3)          That the Interim Strategic Director Children’s Services attends a future meeting of the Bradford East Area Committee meeting in relation to providing progress about CSE work undertaken in the Bradford East area.

 

(4)          That more research is undertaken to understand exploitation of young people within faith communities and information be presented to a future meeting of the Bradford East Area Committee.

 

(5)          That the Interim Strategic Director Children’s Services engages with schools who have not participated in CSE projects in the Bradford East area.

 

(6)          The Strategic Director Children’s Services provides an update about the outcome of the CSE Review within the next 12 months to this Committee.

 

Action:           Interim Strategic Director Children’s Services/Strategic Director Place

 

(Children’s Services Overview and Scrutiny Committee)

 

                                                                                                           

 

Supporting documents: