Public Petitions Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Official Report 527KB pdf

---

Tackling Child Sexual Exploitation in Scotland

Agenda item 2 is evidence in our inquiry into tackling child sexual exploitation in Scotland. As agreed, we will take evidence from two panels. On the first panel are Sheila Taylor MBE, who is chief executive officer, and Cheryl Stevens, who is project co-ordinator, from the NWG Network—the national working group for sexually exploited children and young people. You are both very welcome. Thank you for coming along to aid and advise us in our evidence session today. I invite Ms Taylor to make some brief opening remarks about the work of her group, after which I will kick off with some questions before my colleagues ask further questions.

Thank you very much for inviting us. It is worth explaining how the network works, so that you understand where our knowledge comes from.

In a previous life, I was the chief executive of Safe and Sound Derby, which was the charitable organisation responsible for making the police respond to child sexual exploitation in Derbyshire. That led to 28 girls going through the court system to give evidence and nine men going to prison for a total of 84 years. We learned a lot in that process. Through the child exploitation and online protection centre’s thematic inquiry, we noted that we had 554 cases of child sexual exploitation, at all different levels, to manage within the organisation over a three-year period. That is where my knowledge came from.

I then moved to the national working group, which is a network of professionals that involves more than 260 organisations, including entire safeguarding children boards, a whole police force, organisations such as Barnardo’s and national organisations. It has become a massive network of professionals who deal only with child sexual exploitation. Our job is, through the network, to help people get through the complexities of child sexual exploitation, so we have a wide brief. We have young people from all sorts of different backgrounds who experience all types of child sexual exploitation, and we help people to couple up with someone else who has dealt with something along the same lines, so that they can learn from their successes and errors. We have a range of forums, covering boys and young men, serious case reviews, police work, strategic leads, those who manage case loads, research practitioners, parents, health and a range of other specific issues within child sexual exploitation. Our job is to pull all of that together.

Our website has more than 500 resources that people can download to help them manage child sexual exploitation, and we will shortly add a 90-minute online training programme that our team of specialists has put together

It might be worthwhile for me to brief the committee on our team of specialists. We have somebody with an enforcement background who specialises in trafficking, as the experiences and symptoms of children and young people who are sexually exploited—whether or not they are trafficked—are more akin to those of trafficking victims than anything else.

We have someone who comes from a health background and has been a designated nurse for more than 10 years. He has a history in mental health therapy and huge knowledge in the area of child sexual exploitation, so he progresses work in the health arena. We have people in our team with child protection, safeguarding and strategic backgrounds in order to help our work. We also have somebody who helps to bring out the young people’s voices on what they need and their experiences of having agencies working with them at different times.

That is a very brief sketch of our network, but it covers more than 1,600 professionals who work in the field of child sexual exploitation.

Thank you for that outline. I have a couple of questions—I will start with a straightforward one to set your work in a Scottish context. I understand that your organisation has a United Kingdom-wide remit. What links do you have—or aspire to have—with Scotland that might assist us with our inquiry?

We have some projects in Scotland—Cheryl Stevens might be better able to answer that question.

Yes, we currently have as members the Quarriers what if projects, the wilderness project, Barnardo’s Scotland, the green light project in Aberdeen and the Aberlour Child Care Trust.

The specialist team are in Scotland this week to visit those projects, make links and take learning from Scotland to feed into the network. The network only works if the network works it, if you like.

We will take the resources that Scotland can give the network, put them in and share them out again. We are building links throughout the UK.

The organisations that you mentioned are all well respected. You will know that it was the petition from Barnardo’s Scotland that led to the committee’s inquiry.

My second question is wider and relates to England and Wales, in which you have particular experience. You may have picked up on a Sunday Times report couple of days ago that stated:

“Child protection reforms brought in after the Baby P scandal have failed to reduce the number of deaths of young children from neglect and abuse”.

That includes sexual exploitation in the home. What is your assessment of that claim?

We deal with child sexual exploitation and not familial abuse—we separate those two elements, which perhaps muddies the waters with regard to statements such as that in Sunday Times. I am not sure what the figures are in that regard.

However, I know that there are often deaths in the area of child sexual exploitation simply because people have not realised the gravity of the situations that young people experience. A child who is experiencing child sexual exploitation is one of the most vulnerable young people of all, and many are just hanging on. If they are in a very difficult position, we start to lose lives.

The Sunday Times article notes that the Manchester safeguarding children board undertook “a detailed analysis” of 14 serious case reviews in England where a child had died from neglect or abuse. The common thread that it picked up was

“a failure by child protection agencies to communicate clear signs of child abuse to each other or rigorously to assess the risk of harm.”

What is your view of that assessment?

I support that absolutely—we do not train our professionals in how to look for child sexual exploitation. I can give you a flavour. We all know about the Rochdale case, the Oxford case, which was at the Old Bailey, and operation retriever in Derbyshire, and we can list a host of other cases that have made it into the media. Those cases inform people in their arena.

In my tours of the UK—the whole team are out all the time, as we travel constantly to meet people to talk about the issue—very often when I am with the police or social services, for example, I find that they look for a particular set of indicators, which in turn spawn investigations around the type of people whom the media have covered. The hardest sexually exploited young person to spot would be a young man from a black and minority ethnic community background who has a disability and who is exploring his sexuality. Of course, we do not deal well with any of those things and we do not spot those cases. The likelihood that such a young man will be picked up as a case of child sexual exploitation is low.

Another aspect is that we often criminalise our young people. We see behaviour as a criminal activity and we do not understand that it is a symptom of child sexual exploitation. That is a key issue. University College London did a short piece of research into the links between offending, child sexual exploitation and the overrepresentation in relation to that. That covered three categories: aggressive crime, acquisition crime and non-compliance crime. Aggressive crime means things such as assault. When people get into difficult situations, they might become aggressive. For example, if they are in a care home, they might be aggressive with people there if they receive a text message that says that they have to leave and go somewhere or other. The consequences are so great that it is actually easier for the person to go rather than to let themselves be restrained, which might end up with assaults and that type of thing.

An example of acquisition crime would be young people who have to shoplift the vodka that offenders then use on them to make them more compliant. The offenders will give the young people massive amounts of alcohol, which makes them more compliant to the abuse that is about to happen, and it means that they are not credible witnesses because they cannot get their story straight, as they cannot remember. We are seeing fatal levels of alcohol being given to children.

Are you aware of any studies among prisoners to assess levels of past abuse?

I am not aware of any, and I think that that is a gap everywhere. Research has been done on paedophilia and the drivers for it, but we are not looking at paedophilia—we are looking at hebephilia, which is an American term. Paedophilia involves pre-pubescent children, whereas hebephilia involves post-pubescent children. There is a different driver for that. I am not aware of any research on that, and we are fairly comprehensive in our coverage. That is a gap in our society.

Obviously, I cannot predict what the committee might recommend in our report, which is still to be written, but would it be useful for us to flag that up to the Scottish Government and suggest that it should endorse future research into levels of past abuse among the prison population?

My take on this is that we can put as many sticking plasters on as we like, but the conveyor belt of children will keep going until we work out what is driving it. The drivers of the conveyor belt are the people who perpetrate the crimes. We have to be careful not to limit it to male offenders. We have a case at the moment where the leader of the group is a woman. Although the group is predominantly male, it is led by a woman. People are less able to see women as offenders, especially if they have a family and seem to be normal members of society.

There is a stereotyping approach.

Yes—there is stereotyping.

I ask Cheryl Stevens whether she wishes to comment on anything.

Not at the moment, but I will do.

Right. I want to make sure that you get your time in court.

I want to follow up on the point about the number of professionals who are involved in your network. You said that you represent 260 organisations and 1,600 professionals. How many professionals do you estimate are out there working in the area? Are the professionals whom you bring together just the tip of the iceberg, or do some people who work in the area not realise the links that could be made with the national working group?

09:30

We have 1,600 professionals. I am not saying that everybody who works with child sexual exploitation is a member of the network, but a huge number are, simply because people feel lost when they start to work with the issue. We create the network and the specialist team that is on the end of the phone to give people advice and help them along. It does not really matter what the legislation says; the advice for young people on keeping safe and how to manage all of that is the same.

I sit on the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England inquiry into child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups, which has done different site visits. Through that work, we recognise that a huge number of safeguarding children boards in England still turn around and say that there is no child sexual exploitation in their town or city. That is just not true. If you look for a specific format for child sexual exploitation, you will think that you do not have any, as it looks slightly different in your town or city.

We do not have all the professionals who work in the field. We are in Scotland because we feel that we are underrepresented in Scotland, given how we might be able to help. We had a long conversation about how we could inform Scottish people about how we can help and tell them that the network is as accessible to them as it is to everybody else. We have come up for the week to talk to a range of people.

One issue is the links, or lack of them, between the different agencies that are supposed to be working in child sexual exploitation. I am thinking about the police and social work, education and health services. How many of those types of organisations are part of the national working group? Is there a need for closer working relationships with different organisations and agencies to get them to understand the links and the need to work closely together?

We have a wide range of professionals, front-line practitioners, researchers and policy makers from health, education, social care, charities and charitable projects. We link into every agency that we can, but some areas have more representation than others.

The network holds forums and shares information, and not just from health to health, for example. The health forum shares its learning and challenges with all the other forums. It will share problems, challenges, learning and effective working practices with the boys and young men forum, which will share information with the local safeguarding children boards strategic leads forum. We assist each area to understand problems and the constraints that each organisation may have. Health will have a work remit, but the police may not understand that remit, and they may ask about things that are beyond it. Likewise, health will ask the police about things that are beyond their remit. We help to show people what the different remits are and how everybody can share information.

One of the biggest questions throughout the network is how we can share information effectively—not only official information that needs to be shared with the police and social care, but information that needs to be shared with every other agency. The network is very good in that regard. An agency can ask us a question, we sterilise the information so that no sensitive information is included, send the question out across the network, listen to what the network says in response, and feed that back to whoever asked the question. That sharing of information is successful, and that is what makes us unique and successful as a network organisation.

I will give another example. The health forum recognised that there is an underrepresentation of health movement and a lack of ability in identifying and putting in the right therapeutic interventions for young people who are experiencing child sexual exploitation. We worked with the health forum and a retired general practitioner to create a grassroots survey of practitioners in the field that asked about the barriers they face and their successes. The results were published in a report called “If you Shine a Light you will probably find it”. The report, which is on the front page of our website, is very clear about what young people experience, and anyone can download it to learn about the health issues that affect children and young people.

I welcome all the information that has been provided on the issue, on what the website does and on the links through the network. How many of you are working in your specialist team, and how is it funded?

When I started in 2011, there was just me and a seven-hour worker who managed the network. We are now a team of seven. We tend to work directly with about 7,000 professionals over a year, in different ways, but the number of telephone calls and consultations that we do is much wider than that. We are only a team of seven, but we are still accessible. I do not know how we manage it, but we seem to be able to answer most people’s queries and network them with somebody else, because that is the point. We are not looking for all the answers; we want to understand what everybody else is doing so that, if a police officer is doing an investigation into a particular pattern of child sexual exploitation, we will know somebody else who has done something similar and we can put those two investigating officers together. If there is a health or child protection case that is very difficult, we will match that with somebody else so that they can share professional knowledge in confidence.

To answer the second part of your question, we are funded through charitable donations and grant-giving bodies, so we continue to put in funding bids.

Have there been any discussions with the UK Government regarding direct funding?

We have had discussions with the UK Government. We are currently a recipient of a Department for Education grant that is aimed at the voluntary sector, but I do not think there is any other understanding that we could become funded by the Government. That is a shame, because a huge amount of our resource is spent on trying to find the money to keep those individuals going. It is difficult to put a number on how many people we support, but I would suggest that we probably support several thousands of professionals in one way or another, either through the website or by putting information out through LinkedIn, Facebook and other channels that help to make it accessible.

Given your earlier evidence regarding the number of cases that are now emerging and on-going, and the future cases that may be out there, I was interested in your comment that some local authorities do not recognise that any child sexual exploitation is taking place in their area. How do we get the message over, and how do you get the message over, to professionals and other agencies working in local authority and health board areas that do not recognise the signs that may indicate child sexual exploitation?

In England, part of our Department for Education bid involves being proactive in areas that say that, so we can cover some of that. However, organisations must still have the will to move forward. It is interesting that, when we go to an area that says that it does not have child sexual exploitation, because we have lived and breathed the issue—since 1999 in my case and from very early on in Cheryl Stevens’s case—we can often see the recruitment activity happening to get young people involved in towns and cities. That is happening in our communities.

We have created a community awareness programme—it is called say something if you see something—that can be downloaded and sent out with all the details on. It comes with training and it is aimed at everybody in the community, including hotels, retailers, visiting ice rinks and fairs—visiting entertainment that comes to town is a major issue. The idea is to inform all the people who work in such settings.

One area has gone so far as to use a training programme on child sexual exploitation to teach people, when they are training to be taxi drivers, what child sexual exploitation looks like and how to identify it. Taxi drivers in that area are now ringing the police to say, “I’ve got this—it isn’t right. What do I do about it?” That is prevention.

We can do the intensive stuff all we like, but we must put prevention in place and stop children being raped. We talk about child sexual exploitation, but we are talking about systematic multiple rape over a long term.

I have had a concern throughout the committee’s inquiry. You talked about visiting fairs, and I remember reading a book about the black country a number of years ago that raised the issue of child sexual exploitation among young males. How do you get the message over to the public about reporting child sexual exploitation that they suspect is taking place in the area of a local authority or police authority that does not recognise that such exploitation is happening?

That is an issue. When the public and parents ring us to say that the situation is not being handled effectively in their area, we pick up the phone to offer that area our expertise, to help it to manage cases more effectively. This is a journey; some people have got on the train, some have yet to get on it and some of us have been on it for a while. That is the difficulty with where we are.

There is still a lot to learn—for example, in relation to young people from our black and ethnic minority communities, who find it incredibly difficult to come forward and have added complexities in doing so. They face added threats, which make it difficult for them to disclose their situation. In addition, we do not create the right environment for them to do that. The Muslim Women’s Network UK has done interesting work in producing a report on victims from the Asian community, which describes the difficulties and barriers that they face in coming forward.

You mentioned your website and your presence on Facebook, Twitter and so on, but how do people get to that? Do you publicise your work in other ways to third sector agencies in England? Do you also cover Wales?

Yes—and Northern Ireland.

A more difficult issue is how you advertise to victims of exploitation the good work that you do.

We need to be clear that we do not work directly with victims. We support professionals to do their job. I hope that, in a few years’ time, the network will not be needed and professionals will have mainstreamed the work—they will understand what they are looking for and be able to manage that. We should have no more than a five-year strategy behind us, but I feel that the strategy might have to be for considerably longer.

Upskilling people is the thing, so that we are not working directly with young people, other than through the youth participation, when we hear their voice and about what they need. It is also important to hear what parents need. Not all parents are involved in this, and many are the best protectors and providers. We need to hear their voice and what they need to support them. We should strengthen the family unit so that the child is better protected.

It is really word of mouth that gets us out there. We run on an absolute shoestring, but we seem to manage quite well. I want people to join us because they want to join the network. I do not want people just to feed off the network; I want people to feed the network as well. That is the way it works. The larger the network, the more information that we have in it.

09:45

I understand your point about not working directly with victims. I have a particular interest in victims and I would be quite keen to develop in Scotland the English model of a victims commissioner. As part of that, I met the previous victims commissioner for England and Wales and the previous victims champion for England and Wales. I have been interested in the work that they have done, directly in the Ministry of Justice. Have you had any direct involvement with the victims commissioner?

I have had more involvement with the Commission for Victims and Survivors in Northern Ireland than I have had with the commissioner in England and Wales. We tend to respond mostly to the professionals, although we get called on by the Home Office and central Government to help them to develop their strategies.

It is important to have somebody to answer to this issue and to look at it properly. It is a big, complex issue, which involves many children, yet it is so underrepresented that unless we give it proper focus, we will not pick up all those children. When we do not pick up those children and we allow them to go back into society untreated and unsupported, they will grow up to be adults with a warped sense of what a healthy relationship is, and we will just be perpetuating all the issues.

One thing that is absolutely important but which we really have not got yet is the therapeutic intervention. We talk about investigation, disruption and prosecution, and we talk about child protection, making the child safe and how best to protect them, but then we stop. What are we doing? Who will help those children to recover as much as they can? I came across a case in which one young person had been raped by 43 men in one night. How does a young person recover from that if somebody does not put the right therapy in place?

However, we have to understand it better as well. Part of what we do is to work with countries overseas that have grown in a different way from us. We did some work with Holland, which has quite a nice therapeutic intervention. We are going back to Holland in November to look at the next stages. There are approaches out there in the wider world, and we try to network so that we bring in what is being done in different countries.

We are holding a conference in March next year. We have only two speakers, one of whom is a lady who manages projects in Uganda—a non-governmental organisation voluntary worker. Such organisations are largely how those children are managed at the moment, on a day-to-day basis. The other speaker is from a research-to-action project in the United States of America on the therapeutic needs of children.

The rest of the conference—this goes back to the network—will be tailor made. There will be 40 workshops and, over the two days, conference delegates will pick the workshops that they need, to tailor make the day to their requirements. That is how we work all the time; as we go round, we recognise practitioners in the field talking about what they do really well. On our list, we have people from Scotland whom we want to come to the conference because there is stuff here that we need to share with the rest of the UK, just as what the UK is doing is useful to Scotland.

That is very useful.

The complexities of understanding, recognising and identifying child sexual exploitation are massive. People tend to see just the behaviour of the victim and to deal with that, because it is easier to deal with antisocial behaviour or theft from an off-licence than it is to see behind those behaviours. Many of the victims whom we are aware of will externalise by smashing windows or kicking police officers. Some of that is about them looking for a means of escape—it is easier to be arrested for something than it is to have to go back to the perpetrator.

We have been looking at child sexual exploitation for years and years, and the complexities are so great that practitioners have to do a massive amount of learning. That is before we even start to look at the learning that the community has to do. It is easier to turn a blind eye and allow things to happen than it is to face up to the issue. It is a massive task. As Sheila Taylor said, we have been looking at the issue for 10 or 15 years. I have been looking at it for longer than that, because my daughter was sexually exploited. Despite that, practitioners in England are answering the same questions that we were answering 10 years ago. As new staff come in, the training is not there for them to learn about the issue. They are learning how to deal with issues that are easier to deal with than sexual exploitation is, such as antisocial behaviour and health problems.

It is important that we teach our children in a school setting how the issue manifests itself in society and what the triggers and indicators are so that they recognise it. When I was a child, the message was about the stranger danger and how children should not take sweets from a stranger. Everyone is nodding their head, because you all knew that message, but we do not do that now. We do not teach young people well about healthy sexual relationships. There was a piece of research by Plymouth University—I think that it was Plymouth, but I could be corrected—that looked at where young people who were exploring their sexuality learned about that type of relationship. Because that is not incorporated in sexual health education in schools or in any other setting, they visited porn sites to see what to do and how things worked. If that is someone’s education, they will have a distorted view of what a healthy gay relationship is. We need to teach our children how to manage the issue.

That gap that you mentioned is clearly as applicable to Scotland as it is to England, Wales and Northern Ireland, so it is certainly something for the committee to think about when we produce our report.

Absolutely. We have tried to address that. We have just worked with an information technology organisation, and a thing called “Cody’s choices” is now downloadable from our website. It is aimed at school settings and people who work with small groups of young people, and it would work with an individual. It takes young people to a setting—whether a hotel, a flat, a shopping centre, a park or a bus station—and looks at how the issue works in those settings, what sexting is, what the implications and impact of it are, what the profile of an offender looks like and all those types of things. A host of photographs are provided, and the children have to guess whether the person is an offender. Photographs are provided of all sorts of people who look as if they are offenders who are not and of people who do not look as if they are offenders who are. It is about getting young people to assess why someone might want to be their friend, to offer them gifts and all the rest of it.

Thank you very much. I need to bring in some other members.

I was busy listening to your evidence, which is super. Welcome to the Scottish Parliament, and thank you for the information that you have provided.

We are loving it.

I will try to keep my questions short. There are loads of questions that I am dying to ask, but I hope to get your cards at the end, so that I can ask you more questions after the meeting.

The convener will be glad to hear that I will focus on just two issues, one of which—strong therapeutic support for young people who have been exploited—you mentioned. You referred to what has happened in Holland and some of the research that has been done in the USA. Is there anything that you think would be relevant for Scotland to learn? Are there any examples of good practice that we should look at?

It is difficult to say that there are examples of good practice. However, we have a number of residential units that are looking at how they support young people. Interestingly, they are all developing in a slightly different way.

When we talk about children in care, we must be careful. We see a range of professionals who say that they have a CSE specialist home, but what they mean is that they have had CSE victims in their home before, they have experienced child sexual exploitation and they know what to expect—there has been no therapeutic intervention.

We have other people who are developing a therapeutic programme, some of which is of enormous help. I would not say that we have it right yet, but I see a willingness in some arenas to develop care that looks different from what we offer currently. I hope that, somewhere along the line in the next year or two, we will be able to hold up something as the start of a therapeutic intervention—we cannot get this right straightaway; we cannot look for clear answers and solutions immediately—that will need to be worked on.

Have you seen, or heard about, any good practice on the measures to disrupt and prosecute offenders that we could use in Scotland?

I am afraid that I cannot use the term “good practice” in relation to anywhere, but I can use the term “effective and improving practice”. Children and young people are still being sexually exploited and raped, so we do not have it right yet.

We have good examples of disruption and investigation. Staffordshire Police has a good method, which I particularly like, of scoping and tasking its police force in dealing with and disrupting child sexual exploitation. Lancashire Police has a good strategic delivery of multi-agency teams to manage sexual exploitation across the whole of its area. We have some really good virtual teams in which people are not co-located, but specific individuals in organisations have virtual management of the situation.

It is important to have a voluntary sector organisation supporting affected young people. In some of the child sexual exploitation and serious case reviews that we see, the voluntary organisation has had between 600 and 800 direct contacts with the young person in a 14-month period. I know of no local authority or statutory organisation having that luxury of time to develop such trust. There must be continuity. Investigations go on for a long time, but the professional individuals from the children’s services and child protection services and the police officers involved change constantly. A person who has been multiply raped will not want to keep talking about that experience. For example, a new social worker who has read their notes may come along and want to hear about it directly, but then that worker moves on or they are off sick and another one comes and the person has to go over it again.

The NGOs offer that continuity. That is important, right from the moment when a person’s case is recognised. It can take months for a child to start talking about what happened to them and that comes out in tiny nuggets of information, which someone has to put together. When a disruption or investigation occurs, that same person has to hold that young person’s hand through the process because it is so frightening. The person then goes to court, and the nine, 11 or 15 men who raped them are present and they may be cross-examined by each of them. We have young people in court for eight or 15 days being cross-examined by men who come across as authoritative, dominating, aggressive and controlling. How does a person get through that unless they have somebody really solid behind them?

I do not know whether you have ISVAs—independent sexual violence advisers—in Scotland. They are an interesting way to manage young people who are going through the court process. It is worth looking at how ISVAs are working in England. The role is a new one—the advisers have been in place for only four years or so. The role is really interesting. That person knows all about how the court process works and they support the young person all the way through; they do not forget to support the family while they do that, because it has to pick up the pieces afterwards.

10:00

Ultimately it does. Thank you—I share your concern.

Thank you. I will bring in Chic Brodie and then Angus MacDonald.

I apologise for being late. I had the opportunity while stationary on the M8 to listen to yesterday’s case in Manchester.

Is that operation Windermere, the Stockport one?

Yes.

We have a cause-and-effect situation and the effect is desperate. We understand that. You mentioned assessment of those who perpetrate the crime. In your wide experience, is there a way by which one could define or determine exactly who might perpetrate such crimes, and therefore pre-empt them?

I do not think that there is. It would be beyond my ability to do that. Somebody must look at that—not just an academic but somebody with a psychological background or a psychotherapy background. A team of people needs to look at the problem properly because, until we understand what the drivers are, we will be unable to put the right interventions in place to stop people coming through.

We need to able to recognise earlier the people who offend, so that that intervention—

In your opinion, is there enough intelligence gathering by social workers or the police to try to pre-empt someone who might fall into the perpetrator category?

No. We wait for activity—we recognise the activity and then we try to disrupt it or we investigate it for prosecution.

The horse has bolted by then, has it not?

Yes. The horse has bolted and children have been raped. We have to understand what drives the problem, in order to start effectively putting something in place. We are working with victims. There will always be victims; at some point or other, we must work with people who offend and those people who buy things or take part but who do not actually go out and recruit. If something is happening with 20 men, it shows the supply-demand-victim chain, and we should be doing something on all fronts.

I am trying to get at whether there is a mechanism. I listened to the two young girls in yesterday’s case. With the best will in the world, there will always be victims in such circumstances. If we want to shut down or zeroise that effect, we have to do something much more positive about the perpetrators.

Before you arrived, I mentioned that we have done quite a bit of work about paedophilia and we understand that this is not paedophilia. Paedophilia refers to prepubescent children; this is hebephilia, which refers to postpubescent children. We do not even know that word here, so nothing is being done around it, as far as I am aware.

Do you have any experience of work in England, Wales and Northern Ireland that is being done with perpetrators of child sexual exploitation in the prison system, in the community or anywhere else?

We have had contact with quite a few prison workers who have expressed concerns about attitudes. What we are getting down to—this is my personal take, which comes from an evidence background—is the attitude to women. However, it gets complicated, because boys and young men are sexually exploited. They are hard to see, and we see them as young offenders. Quite often, it is learned behaviour that they carry on, but not in all cases. It gets really complicated and it needs a team of professionals to look at it properly.

Good morning, Sheila and Cheryl. I have found the evidence that you have given this morning extremely helpful but extremely troubling as well. It is important to this committee that recognition is given to the need to listen to young people who have experienced CSE but, unfortunately, the committee has had some difficulties in the course of the inquiry in arranging direct contact with exploited young people. You have already stated that you do not work directly with victims, but can you tell us what initiatives are out there to enable the voices of young people to be heard and, what is more important, how the young people’s voices can be used to influence policy in the future?

Leslie, who is sitting behind me in the public gallery, is part of my team and is our youth participation officer, so she will come and tap me on the shoulder and tell me if I get something wrong here. However, we run a number of initiatives in which people get involved. For example, there is the having our say 2 photography project, which is about young people trying to get some of their thought patterns through to professionals. It is really difficult for young people to come forward and talk about CSE. I do not think that I could sit here and talk to you about it if I had been multiply raped on a number of occasions, but it is even more complicated for young people of 12 or 13 to do that. The photography project is one way of bringing young people’s voices through.

The Association for Young People’s Health has looked at peer-on-peer mentoring with young people. That has a health aspect and is the young person’s voice coming through for the health side of things. Leslie, bless her, has passed me a note to help me out on that.

All sorts of experiences of young people have been documented. We have just had a dialogue with three young women who experienced child sexual exploitation for a number of years. Quite a lot of young people have come out of it to the other side. However, we know that if we do not listen to the young people, we will have only the professional’s assumption about what they need, so listening is really important.

There are ways of listening to the young people’s voices, including ways of doing it that mean that you do not have to do it directly. There are organisations out there that are engaged with children and young people who have been sexually exploited. Have you asked them whether they can get their voices to you through some other means? When the Crown Prosecution Service ran its consultation programme on the new way in which it would manage child sexual exploitation in England, a group of young people responded to the consultation to say how it did not fit with them, and so did a group of parents.

There are therefore mechanisms for hearing the young people’s voices, but you will not get one of them to sit here and talk to you, because that is too great a task. However, there are other ways of doing it. I am more than happy to talk to you about how we can help to facilitate that with organisations in the area. However, you would have to have a small fund of money to enable that to come together because of the constraints that those voluntary sector organisations will have.

The committee had the agreement of organisations, but the difficulty was in getting the individuals to speak. However, that is totally understandable. I hope, though, that that can be looked at again in the future.

I want to follow on from the question that I asked before about the pattern of perpetrators and ask about the parents. Is there a characteristic family or pattern of family environment that would make children easily available to perpetrators? What roles do the parents play?

The role of parents is very important. When we look at child sexual exploitation, we see parents at one end of the scale who are involved and complicit because they are aware of the exploitation but do not do anything to stop it, right through to parents who do everything that they can to stop it. There are professional people such as solicitors, heads of services for the national health service and child protection officers who are parents of children and young people who have been sexually exploited, but those people have not been able to stop it on their own. We regard all parents as being on a raft and susceptible to having their children sexually exploited.

It is worth considering how cases are managed in Holland. There, people talk about multiple-complex cases, which involve a child we might all know about, who has been in the equivalent of our services from childhood and who might have experienced child abuse and been a victim of domestic violence, neglect or drugs and alcohol abuse in families—all things that make a child vulnerable early on. With child abuse in particular, that is learned behaviour, the child does not understand the boundaries and does not know what is normal and not normal, and the progression into child sexual exploitation is part of that journey. The starting point for that child will be much earlier, and work might be required with the family.

There are also single-complex cases. Such a case might involve a Daisy Sunshine of this world. She has no vulnerabilities in her life, and she has a normal, healthy relationship with her parents in a happy family home. Her only vulnerability arises when she is a teenager. She might be friends with somebody who is engaged in child sexual exploitation. Out of concern or curiosity, she might go along one day, and she gets locked in, raped and filmed—she is involved then, with the blackmail and all the rest of it. A whole host of other things might manifest themselves around that individual child. The starting point for that individual is very different. Usually in such cases, the family is very supportive in trying to do everything that it can to manage the situation.

On the other side, there are what are called cultural complexities in Holland. In Holland, they look just at the links between forced marriage and child sexual exploitation, but I would expand the consideration of cultural differences to take in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender difficulties and issues involving young people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, people associated with gangs and a whole host of factors in cases where it is the culture that a child is in that influences things. The starting point for that child will be different from the starting point for Daisy Sunshine—a young person who has not had anything happen to her in her life that has involved services since early on.

So there are no common threads.

There are no common threads.

After the event, what conversations will be held with parents? Is there any analysis of the parents’ involvement?

It might be very useful for you to speak to representatives of an organisation called PACE. Can you remember what that stands for, Cheryl?

Parents Against Child Sexual Exploitation.

I do not know whether PACE covers Scotland—it covers all of England. It is a network of parents who all have children who have been sexually exploited. It may well be worth asking PACE for its analysis of parents. The parents will be no different, whether they are from Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales or anywhere else—their experiences will be much the same.

I can remember a parent telling me that I have no idea what it feels like, sitting around a table with professionals, trying to protect their child, and everybody has a file in front of them on their child, but they do not know what is in it. The parent has to learn the job of everybody around that table to ensure that they are doing the job that they should be doing. We should be strengthening the family unit and helping it to support the children. We are seeing the family unit dissolving under the pressure, with siblings going on to be sexually exploited or other issues arising.

You have mentioned PACE. If the committee agrees, we can write to it and ask for some written evidence to aid our understanding of the issues.

Yes. We can help you with the details, and we can make that connection alongside you, so that PACE responds to you appropriately.

Even though it does not operate in Scotland, there will not be huge differences between the two nations on this issue. I appreciate that.

I emphasise how welcome your knowledge and information has been. There is real concern about the Asian, black and ethnic communities. This is black history month, and the Scottish Parliament has hosted a black history exhibition—and I hope that you go along and see it before you leave the building today. To give you a flavour, the cross-party group in the Scottish Parliament on the middle east and south Asia has a keen interest in working with young women in particular and in looking at human trafficking and female genital mutilation. I will perhaps follow that up with you later.

10:15

If you have a task group that is looking at the issue, we are open to an invitation to sit on it and to help you to expand that knowledge. If you do not need us, that is fine and we are not worried about it, but we are happy to sit round that table if there is something that we can help you with. We perhaps do not need to attend every meeting, or we might do so for a period. We sit on a lot of strategic groups. I sit on the Home Office working group on sexual violence against children. We sit on a number of Association of Chief Police Officers groups and strategic oversight groups. There is no reason why that cannot happen here. All that we ask for is some assistance with the cost of travel to get up and down, as we do everywhere else.

In asking this, I am not laying the victims aside. We have talked about the perpetrators and the parents—what is the attitude of the police and social work people to such cases? I am talking not about specific cases, but in general. Is the approach all-embracing and one of heavy involvement? What is the approach?

To give a broad-brush picture, there are cases where the approach is not right. I see the police taking the lead. The police are more proactive on the issue almost everywhere I go across the UK. That is usually because they have heard of the big stories and they understand that there has not been a good response to previous allegations, so they are exploring that. We see that child protection services are playing catch-up a bit because they might not be aware of what has happened in policing and then suddenly find something in an investigation. Simply because of the nature of the issue, an investigation cannot last for a long time, because we are talking about young people being raped. There has to be a disruption or an arrest quickly, because there are young people in a rape situation. Quite often, there has been a failure to engage the appropriate health professionals to build that network of support and welfare round the child.

We have a strategy that works well when a local authority is trying to work out an approach. We call it the gold, silver and bronze strategy. The gold part involves the decision makers from the police, the health service, youth offending services and child protection services coming together to ensure that they have properly resourced what needs to happen. The silver group is the heads of service who are managing directly those who work in the service. The bronze level is the practitioners who work directly with the children. Those three levels feed backwards and forwards into one another.

That works fairly successfully in each area, but I suggest that Scotland might need a platinum level, which is an overarching approach setting out what Scotland is going to do. Each area would then have its gold, silver and bronze levels. That is nice and easy to articulate and to communicate to professionals in a way that they understand.

As you know, one advantage of having a single police force is that at least we do not have a postcode lottery, with different police approaches in different areas. That certainly helps.

Yes, but you need to develop specialism within the teams. One difficulty that I experience wherever I go is that the police are the most fluid organisation that I have come across. A police officer can be in a post but, because of the way that the police work, they can be part of the way through an investigation, which means knowing the young people and understanding them, but then be moved on. Every two or three years, they are moved on. We need a specialist team that will stay in post for a while.

What is the definition of an area? The convener made a point about Police Scotland. I am sure that police officers do not do one job and then move on to another as quickly as that. Is the issue not more to do with the community than with a larger area, as Sheila Taylor talks about? What has been your experience of working with smaller communities, where potential victims or perpetrators or poor parenting might be better known?

We have a duty to create a society in which there is zero tolerance on the issue, but we have a long way to go on that. We need Auntie Gladys to report it if something is going on in her family, next door or on the street. Community education has to happen. Before you arrived, I mentioned our say something if you see something campaign, which has posters and flyers on what people are looking for and what they should do. There is a pro forma that people can fill out if they have never given information to the police before. There is information on how to do it and how to fill out the form. There are 90 pages of help for communities to create zero tolerance in society.

Sadly, we are out of time—I allowed a little bit more time. I am sure that I speak on behalf of the committee in thanking both our witnesses for their excellent evidence. It is obviously a difficult area, so it has been tremendous to have your expertise and your signposting to other organisations that we can use. I am sure that the committee will want to use you as a resource when it comes to writing up our report to get pointers and to use your expertise in a practical way. As you said, I do not believe that there is a huge difference between Northern Ireland, Wales, England and Scotland. We have to look at the best practice that you have identified and at the gaps in Scotland. From today, I can certainly pick up several points on which it would be essential to make recommendations to the Scottish Government, which is of course awaiting our report. I am grateful to the Government that it is not rushing ahead with its report and is waiting until we have completed ours so that we can help to guide practice in Scotland.

We are more than happy to help with any recommendations and to put more meat on the bones for that in any way that we can. This visit is probably just the first to Scotland, although I have to confess that I have been up here several times, but that was to see individual people. It would be nice to be more involved.

Thank you again for coming and for giving evidence.

I suspend the meeting for two minutes to allow the witnesses to leave.

10:22 Meeting suspended.

10:26 On resuming—

We will now hear from Professor Kirsten Stalker, who is professor of disability studies at the University of Strathclyde. Thank you for coming to the meeting. I appreciate your arriving early in order to hear the previous evidence session, which I hope was useful to you.

Professor Stalker is a member of the Scottish ministerial working group on child protection and disability. Professor Stalker, I ask you to address the committee briefly. That will be followed by questions, in the same manner as with the previous panel.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone.

As the convener said, I am professor of disability studies in the social work section at the University of Strathclyde. I am also a qualified social worker. Most of my research has been on disabled children’s everyday lives, views and experiences, disabled adults and adults with learning disabilities.

In 2010, along with colleagues at Strathclyde, I published a scoping study that looked at the abuse of disabled children, child abuse and child protection, and the needs and rights of disabled children. Although it was only a small study, there has been quite a lot of interest in it, which shows the dearth of research and information about abuse of disabled children. I can tell the committee about some of the lessons from that, if it is of interest.

Professor Julie Taylor, who is professor of child protection at the University of Edinburgh, and I have funding from the Scottish Government to look at thresholds and triggers in relation to practitioners acting on child protection concerns in relation to disabled children. We are completing the fieldwork and doing the analysis for that work, which should report at the end of the year.

Professor Taylor and I also have funding from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to carry out a UK-wide study to look at the views and experiences of child protection services among disabled young adults and children.

I have not done any research specifically about child sexual exploitation in relation to disabled children, although I have done a little bit of homework for today. There is not much research on the topic.

Thank you. You predicted my first question, which was about the work that you have done on child protection in relation to the abuse and maltreatment of children and young people with disabilities—I think that you have effectively answered it.

Are there big gaps in the academic research that we could recommend to the Scottish Government that it should address?

Yes. There is definitely a gap in knowledge about disabled children and young people in relation to child sexual exploitation. I have had a brief discussion with Professor Jenny Pearce about the need for research and the possibility of doing some UK-wide research on the topic. It would be good if the Scottish Government was interested in funding someone to do such research.

That is a useful suggestion about future research, because part of our job is to make recommendations to the Government. I appreciate your points on that.

10:30

Good morning, Professor Stalker. You said that you have not focused on child sexual exploitation but on the sexual exploitation of disabled groups. For me, disability covers a wide range of different conditions. Have you done any research, and do you have any findings on whether particular disabled groups are more vulnerable than others?

Yes. Perhaps the point to make before I answer the specific question is that disabled children generally are at greater risk of abuse than non-disabled children. A meta-analysis of 17 studies looking at a total of more than 18,000 children, which was published in The Lancet, concluded that the prevalence rate of abuse of disabled children was three to four times higher than that of non-disabled children. However, that and other research has indicated that certain disabled groups are at even higher risk. For example, in 2000 Sullivan and Knutson published a very big study that was carried out in Nebraska, which looked at the records of more than 50,000 disabled and non-disabled children and concluded that children with behavioural disorders had a 5.5 times higher risk of abuse than non-disabled children, and that children with learning disabilities had a four times higher risk of abuse than non-disabled children.

What we do not know enough about is the direction of causality. For example, some children, particularly those with behavioural disorders and developmental delay, might have acquired those impairments as a result of having been abused—in fact, some will definitely have done so—but we do not know enough about the extent of that causation.

That is interesting. We are interested in the work that has been done to identify sexual exploitation of disabled children. You are right that there is a crossover between children with behavioural difficulties—or children with behaviours that are regarded as not normal—and how such behaviours might have been caused by something in the family. Have any studies been done on whether specific behaviour by children is a result of their treatment or sexual exploitation in the family? Do we know the root cause of such behaviours?

I am not aware of such studies. Some medical studies might have considered that area, but as I come from a social work background I tend not to look at medical literature. However, I have read a number of studies in which the point is made that we do not know enough about that direction of causality. The area requires further investigation.

Given that some of your area covers the experience of older individuals with disabilities, could you give examples of where you think from your investigations sexual exploitation might have started at an early age rather than later in life? Do you have examples of where sexual exploitation of an individual might have taken place at a younger age but has just emerged because of the care that has been put in place for that individual, with the people who work with them having identified that sexual exploitation has taken place? Often, the only cases that we hear about involve someone with a disability who is in a care home and a care worker is identified as the perpetrator. There have been a couple of high-profile cases involving such circumstances in the media recently.

Can you give any examples of where you think that particular groups of disabled individuals may be more prevalent in terms of being abused by carers or family members?

I got slightly lost there, because I felt that the question changed at the end. I think that your initial points were about the age of the children.

Yes.

There is evidence from the large Nebraska study by Sullivan and Knutson that the typical onset age of abuse of disabled children is younger than it is for non-disabled children. Typically, abuse of non-disabled children starts around six to nine, which is early primary school age, whereas that very large-scale study found that typically the onset of abuse of disabled children was from nought to five, which is pre-school age. We do not know the reasons for that, but the difference is quite significant.

You did not ask me about this, but I think you should know that there is also a difference in gender patterns in the abuse of disabled and non-disabled children. Again, this is not something that we fully understand, but evidence from a number of studies shows that boys are disproportionately represented among disabled children and young people who have been abused, compared with the male and female ratios among non-disabled young people who have been abused, if you see what I mean—and that includes sexual abuse. There are more males than females in the population of disabled people generally, but the difference is not large enough to explain that difference in the incidence of abuse.

You indicated that the level of abuse in the pre-five age group is higher for disabled people than it is in society in general.

It is higher than it is for non-disabled children.

Who are the main perpetrators of the abuse?

I do not know the answer to that question. I would imagine that at that early age it would be family. The most common form of abuse of disabled children—I know that this is not what the committee is looking at—is neglect. Of course, neglect may make children more vulnerable to other types of abuse, including sexual exploitation.

Could you repeat the question?

Who are the main perpetrators of such abuse?

It is important to bear it in mind that most parents of disabled children provide loving, safe, secure homes for their children and do not abuse them. However, there is some evidence that, in relation to young teenage girls with learning disabilities for example, there may sometimes be older men who present themselves as a boyfriend—they may or may not be family friends or acquaintances. I am sure that that could come under your remit of child sexual exploitation.

I am generalising, but we know from a lot of research that many young disabled people in general—and young girls with learning disabilities in particular—may feel lonely, and may feel that they do not have a lot of friends and that it is hard for them to keep up with their peer group and do everything that their peer group does. Therefore, they may be particularly vulnerable to approaches and to grooming and so on by older people—older men.

Sorry, Professor Stalker, but I have to come back to pre-five abuse. For clarification in my own mind, is abuse more neglect than sexual exploitation?

The most common form of abuse of disabled children of any age is neglect. Abuse generally—I do not know if it is specifically neglect; I am speculating that at that age it may be neglect—of disabled children, in comparison with non-disabled children, typically starts in that earlier age group.

Given that our inquiry is about child sexual exploitation, I am just trying to make clear the evidence that we are hearing, which is that there is abuse but not necessarily sexual exploitation.

I have not got any evidence or heard anything that suggests that disabled children under five are subject to sexual exploitation. I dare say that some may be, but I have not seen any evidence about that.

Good morning, Professor Stalker. I note your background in social work. I hope that I am not misconstruing what you are saying, but am I right that we are not capturing and consolidating information to provide a base for research?

There has been very little research in Britain over the past decade about policy and practice in relation to the protection of disabled children. The study that the Scottish Government commissioned, which I am involved in, is one of the first for about 10 years.

How aware are social work departments of the need to provide not just general information but specific information on cases involving disabled children?

It varies tremendously. In a small scoping study that we did two or three years ago, we found that some senior managers in central and local government were unaware of the higher incidence of abuse of disabled children and actually had the view that because a child was disabled they were somehow protected from abuse. There is a myth that nobody would dream of harming a disabled child.

Are we saying that in 2013 there is still a myth that disabled children are somehow exempt from being abused?

In 2010, some people had that view; yes. I think that probably some still do.

Wow!

You mentioned a small-scale study. Could you share the results of that study with our clerks and give us some information on it?

Yes.

I will not take up time now, but that would be useful.

Good morning, Professor Stalker. You have already covered the prevalence of CSE and said that perhaps your current understanding is limited with regard to statistics.

Excuse me for interrupting, but I covered the prevalence of child abuse, not specifically sexual exploitation.

Okay.

As you know, there has been some debate and dispute regarding the prevalence of CSE among young people. From what you said in your opening statement, it is unlikely that there are any current statistics that show, for example, the prevalence of CSE among young people with disabilities, although you stated that it could be three or four times higher than it is among non-disabled young people.

No. I stated that there is evidence that abuse generally of disabled children is three to four times higher. I have no specific figures on child sexual exploitation.

Clearly, we need to get those figures. What measures would produce a more accurate understanding of the prevalence of CSE among young people with disabilities? How can we get those figures?

One of the first things would be to have practitioners record the presence of impairment whenever they deal with disabled children. We know that even in cases that go forward to the child protection register, impairment is very often not recorded. The Scottish Government’s child protection statistics suggest that the rate of abuse of disabled children is very low, whereas it is actually higher than it is among non-disabled children on average.

Sometimes there are issues about practitioners recognising that a child has an impairment, particularly if it is a learning disability or an invisible impairment, or if the child is on the autistic spectrum. It may be difficult for practitioners to be aware of the impairment, and therefore it is not recorded. The NWG Network is addressing those statistics. It is an area where improvement is needed.

Clearly.

You mentioned a child with autism. There should be a system whereby, if such an impairment is recognised at a later date, the information should be added retrospectively.

It should be, yes, but in the working group we have discovered that it is not added retrospectively. The records are completed at referral. If it later emerges that a young person has an impairment that was not originally recognised, practitioners do not think to go back and put that on the records, which are sent to the Scottish Government as the statistics.

So, currently, the figures are not accurate.

10:45

John Wilson has a quick follow-up question.

My question goes back to vulnerable individuals, particularly those who are on the autistic spectrum and those who are physically disabled. I want to separate the issue of abuse from that of child sexual exploitation. Do we have any evidence that shows that children in those groups are more vulnerable to child sexual exploitation than are children in society in general? I am talking not about pre-fives, but about children who are older than that. I want to tie the issue in with our wider inquiry into child sexual exploitation in society in general.

I do not know whether what we have amounts to rigorous evidence, but I have looked at a number of reports on child sexual exploitation that have been published in the past few years to see whether disabled children were mentioned in them. In our scoping study, we had one example of a young girl with mild learning disabilities who was sexually abused in the family home for a number of days by friends of her father. Although that case was reported to the police through an aunt, it was dropped, because it was not thought that the child would be seen as a reliable witness. That is a big issue for disabled children and young people in such cases. I know that a lot of cases do not go forward to court anyway, but I think that that is a particular problem when a disabled child is involved. The child in that case was able to name the first name of one of the perpetrators but did not know the name of the other perpetrator, and that was seen as being no evidence.

Members probably saw in the press the recent case of a young deaf-mute woman who was trafficked into the country at the age of 10. She had to work as a slave, labouring and so on for an older couple, but she was also persistently raped by the man. That case was heard in court recently.

I have read about a six separate cases involving disabled teenage girls who contacted ChildLine. Those young people, who had learning disabilities, had been subjected to internet grooming and had been asked to send explicit pictures over the internet. One of them told ChildLine that a man had told her that she was beautiful, which no one had ever told her. Another man said that she would be loved if she sent the photos. We are talking about young people who might have quite low self-esteem, which could be associated with their difficulties.

The committee’s previous witnesses referred to the report, “Unheard Voices: The Sexual Exploitation of Asian Girls and Young Women”, which has just been published by the Muslim Women’s Network UK. It looked at 35 cases, of which three were disabled young women, two of whom had learning disabilities.

Yesterday, I talked to a colleague from a voluntary organisation who told me of a case that it is dealing with that involves a young man whom the organisation is fairly certain is on the autistic spectrum, but who has not been diagnosed as being so. He has been found to have downloaded 5,000 indecent images of children, and is about 13 or 14 years old. Apparently, the police were quite taken aback at the scale and level of his activity.

I know that those are isolated examples, but such examples tend to centre around young people with learning disabilities and young people on the autistic spectrum. As I said, it may be that the former group are more prone to being groomed and are perhaps more impressionable and looking for friendship. I know that I am generalising again, but it may be that some in the latter group—young people who are on the autistic spectrum—may be good with information technology, software and computers, but may not understand some of the norms of social relationships. At the risk of stereotyping such young people, some of them can be very persistent, go into things in a lot of detail and become a bit obsessive, so if they latch on to that type of activity they may get into it in a big way.

I understand that individuals with obsessive compulsive disorder may get deeply involved in research, particularly if they can, through the internet, access more information or download more material. You have made some general comments about how vulnerable young people—in particular disabled vulnerable young people—can effectively be lured into situations that are not of their making. You also talked about the police following up and looking for evidence or credible witnesses to go to court. Do you think that that is a serious issue, and are there perpetrators out there who specifically target disabled vulnerable young people, purely because they think that they can get away with carrying out child sexual exploitation without fear of prosecution?

Yes, I do think that; it is linked to the big debate about disability hate crime. There is a view that offending against disabled people is caused by hatred of disabled people; I do not share that view, by and large. I think that a lot of offending against disabled people is because they are seen as easy targets and as being vulnerable. A lot of disability activists do not like that perspective because—understandably—they do not want to portray disabled people as being vulnerable. Nevertheless, if you have a visual impairment you cannot see your attacker coming, if you have a mobility impairment you cannot remove yourself from the site of the abuse, and if you have communication impairments it may be difficult for you to report, so I think that there are aspects of some people’s impairments that make them more vulnerable and that certain perpetrators home in on them.

That is reflected in the law, is it not? If I remember correctly, there are, in relation to sexual exploitation, extra protections for vulnerable people who have mental health issues. The mental health acts lay down extra penalties for people who abuse people who have mental health problems.

I do not know whether there is a mental health act that does that, but there is criminal justice legislation that does, so there would be added penalties and stiffer sentences.

So, that is reflected in the law.

Yes, but the number of people being prosecuted under that law is extremely low—it is in single figures.

We might be able to get some statistics on that. If you have any statistics, we would be grateful if you could pass them on to us.

You have already answered quite a few of the questions that I had about research. When we are considering young people with disabilities who have been, or who may become, victims of CSE, is there a need for specialised training in that area, and is there a need for national guidelines?

Yes, I think that there probably is a need for national guidelines. There are pros and cons to generic guidelines that are applicable to all children and young people, and to guidelines that are specific to disabled children and young people. In England—I think it was in 2006—the Government issued specific guidelines that were about an inch thick on protection of disabled children. In Scotland, at that time, we had only generic guidance, in which until 2010, when national guidance on child protection was issued, disabled children were practically invisible. There was very little to highlight the fact that disabled children and young people are at higher risk and also receive less protection. In 2010, the national guidance on child protection included a short section—about three pages—specifically on disabled children being one of a number of groups that required particular attention. As you know, those guidelines will be refreshed at the end of the year.

There are different views on separate guidance on disabled children. Would practitioners think that it is only for people who work with disabled children and so there would be no need for them to even read them? Would including information on disabled children in generic guidelines mean that such children would be at risk of getting lost in that guidance and their particular vulnerabilities not highlighted? We need to be somewhere in the middle. Perhaps we should have in the national guidance a separate but longer section on the topic, which would refer to additional separate guidance.

We have spoken about training of professional bodies, including in teaching, health, social work and education. Are you aware of best practice and the amount of time or study that is allocated to university courses to train staff in such bodies? Are you involved in that training?

Do you mean specific training on sexual exploitation of disabled children?

Yes.

I have not come across that. I teach social work students about protecting disabled children, but that is because I volunteer to do so. I do not think that awareness is high, but I do not know what training other universities provide. As I said, awareness among practitioners is generally variable, so training is definitely needed. More community awareness and training are needed, too. The issue is partly about how disabled children are viewed and valued—or not—in society. At the end of every research report that I write, I say that a public awareness campaign or education exercise is needed on valuing disabled children and young people.

Is it worth the committee’s while to write to universities that teach social work to ascertain what aspects of disability are covered in courses—in particular, on protection of disabled young people from child sexual exploitation?

Yes. That would be a positive step.

Police training is, I presume, also an issue, and has a key role to play.

Yes. In our scoping study of about three years ago, we interviewed a police representative who had some responsibility for child protection. She said that the police were not always well prepared and trained to interview disabled children and young people who have been abused, and that they relied on their social work colleagues to do that.

While we are talking about the police, I want to ask about procurators fiscal. Once the police make a report, the procurator fiscal decides whether the case should go ahead. Where we have vulnerable disabled individuals—Professor Stalker cited examples in which individuals were felt not to be credible court witnesses—who makes that call? Is it the procurator fiscal’s office?

That would be the subject of a research study that I want to do. A couple of years ago, my colleague Nick Watson at the University of Glasgow obtained figures from all the police forces in Scotland on reports of disability hate crime that had come to them; the figures were very low. We obtained statistics about the number of cases that went from the police to the procurator fiscal, and then from the procurator fiscal to the courts. Then, we counted the number of cases that were prosecuted; I think that eight hate-crime cases were prosecuted in a year.

11:00

Could we go back slightly? How many cases were reported to procurators fiscal?

Procurators fiscal made decisions that resulted in about half a dozen different possible disposals, and only a minority of cases went forward to court. I am sorry that I cannot remember all the figures. Some people got warnings from the procurator fiscal, and other cases were discontinued. There were various other disposals that I cannot remember.

This is an issue that I think we have not covered before. We have discussed social work, education, the police and other agencies, but the committee has not really considered the procurator fiscal’s role within the prosecution scenario. That might be something that we can add to our future deliberations on how cases are dealt with—in particular in relation to vulnerable disabled individuals. Although they might find themselves being listened to sympathetically by the agencies and the police, the cases that find their way to the courts seem to be a small proportion of those that are reported by the police to the procurator fiscal, as Professor Stalker has just indicated.

John Wilson makes some good points. Although we have had representatives of the Crown Office before us, we have had a lot more evidence since then, and other points have arisen. It may well be that the committee will wish to write to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service to ask about the points that have arisen in today’s evidence session.

I am conscious that we are a bit short of time.

Let us pretend that you have a magic wand, Professor Stalker. If you had one wish—to carry out one action that would make the biggest impact—what would it be?

I would wish to include disabled children in all the other measures and initiatives that are taken, and ensure that all those measures and initiatives are accessible to disabled children. Although, as I have said, disabled children have additional needs and may require additional support, they should be included in all measures that are taken to protect children from sexual exploitation, and to prevent it from happening in the first place. That includes simple things, such as considering how disabled children can report and disclose. How accessible are services such as ChildLine to disabled children? Those are things that we do not necessarily always think of. If information is being given out, is it in formats that are accessible to disabled children? If policies are being developed, are we taking account of the particular needs of disabled children?

Alas, we are out of time. I thank Professor Stalker very much for coming along and giving evidence. As I said to the other witnesses, this is a very difficult area, so it is great to have had your expertise today. We hope that you can help and advise us when it comes to writing our report over the next few months.

Yes.

I appreciate your coming along.

11:03 Meeting suspended.

11:05 On resuming—