Item 2 is evidence from two panels of witnesses as part of our inquiry into tackling child sexual exploitation in Scotland. I put on record my thanks to the extremely experienced witnesses whom we will have before us in the next two panels. I know that they are all busy people, but it really helps our inquiry to have senior people and people with excellent first-hand experience. I thank them all for giving up their time to appear before the committee.
As the committee is aware, I manage a street-based service, so we primarily come into contact with young people on the street. As well as observing a lot of activity on the streets, we get information from young people. We observe perpetrators or potential perpetrators who are based in hotspots where young people are around. We share that information with the police on a daily or nightly basis.
Thank you. I have looked at major inquiries that have happened throughout the United Kingdom, for example following the tragic death of a young person. My own experience from working on the front line of social work was that such inquiries made the same sorts of recommendation; for example, better co-ordination among agencies. That seemed to happen time and again. Clearly, I am out of date in my knowledge of day-to-day practice. However, is it still your experience that there is an issue of co-ordination among the agencies that deal with CSE in Scotland?
There is an issue of co-ordination, and also of communication and information sharing. One of the most significant issues in relation to CSE in Scotland is that the vast majority of children on the child protection register tend to be under the age of 12. Children over the age of 12 are on the register only if they are part of a larger sibling group. Therefore CSE does not tend to be captured through child protection registration.
You have just predicted the next question. The good practice that the committee and I saw first hand in Glasgow is clearly identifiable. Why should those techniques not be put in place for the whole of Scotland? Who would be responsible for saying, “This best practice should be developed throughout Scotland?”
From a Barnardo’s perspective, we were hopeful that that could have been picked up as part of the refresh of the national child protection guidance. We also hoped that we could have some kind of good-practice guidance for practitioners across Scotland. We were able to identify some of the key indicators and risk factors and what strategies could be put in place to try to minimise young people’s involvement in sexual exploitation.
I would like to expand Daljeet Dagon’s point that we need a consistent effort across Scotland to be more proactive in how we deal with child sexual exploitation. There is a small issue that I mention with a different hat on, as the previous chair of the Scottish coalition for young runaways. I was heavily involved in the conduct of the pilot of return-home interviews for young runaways in the Grampian area and the follow-up of that within Grampian Police. The outcome of that evaluation was clear: that conducting an interview with a young person who has returned after a period of having run away is a very good thing to do, not just to ensure the welfare of that young person but—critically, from the police’s point of view—to obtain, if possible, some kind of intelligence about the young person’s experience during the period that they ran away. That might include experience of child sexual exploitation and other types of behaviour.
Thank you very much. That was very helpful.
I was chatting to panel members earlier. People will be aware that in Glasgow we have had operation Cotswold. There was significant learning from operation Cotswold, particularly for the police, and I am pleased to share with you that, as well as having a perpetrator strategy, the police have developed a victim strategy for when they conduct future operations. They recognise that they have to be prepared for young people disclosing information and we have to take action when they give us information. As well as information that comes from return interviews, the police in the west of Scotland are developing better measures with which to be proactive and respond better to children who identify sexual exploitation as an issue.
The police will give evidence to the committee two weeks today. I would have thought that the best practice that we are perhaps seeing in Strathclyde would be echoed throughout the whole of Scotland, given that we now have a single police force. That is a question for them, but I think that it is useful to flag it up.
I do not mind having a bash. This is quite clear cut, and it is not just specific to the police. There is a general lack of understanding and awareness of what CSE is, so we have to get better at being able to identify the issue and respond to it, and at being able to support young people, and identify techniques with which we can disrupt and prosecute perpetrators.
It is quite worrying that police officers said that they were not aware of the powers. It is a question for two weeks’ time, but it is useful to make a note of it at this stage.
Good morning, Daljeet. I will follow on from the convener’s question about the number of prosecutions under the current legislation. I might have picked you up wrongly, but I think that you indicated that the police were prepared to proceed with prosecution rather than other measures to deter offences. Given that only person has been prosecuted under the 2005 act, are the police doing enough to prosecute and send out a signal, or have they been lax? You said that some police officers are not aware of their powers under the 2005 act. The number of prosecutions does not give confidence that the police or the Procurator Fiscal Service have taken the issue seriously enough to deal with the perpetrators.
If we are looking to rely heavily on victims’ testimonies, I should point out—and I cannot stress this enough—that most victims do not identify themselves as victims. The best experiences that I have had of young people being able to look back are when they have been 16-plus, but the risk of sexual harm orders under the 2005 act are only for young people up to the age of 15 and a half. Once they hit 16, that order cannot be used to prosecute a perpetrator. We have to check whether the legislation is robust enough and, having spoken to the police, I know that they have found that agencies—by which I mean primarily statutory agencies—very rarely have a co-ordinated approach to 16 and 17-year-olds who are not on any kind of supervision order and are technically seen as adults and therefore as voluntarily engaging in this activity.
As I said in my written submission, we need to strengthen the harbouring provisions in—if my memory serves me right—section 83 of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995. That is not so much about taking an enforcement-led approach; after all—and you would expect me to say this—prevention is better than cure. For me, the issue is not just about statistics of prosecutions or investigations but about enforcing the harbouring provisions to send out a very clear signal and message to adults that, if they want to behave in a particular way to a particular young person or groups of young people, that behaviour will be taken very seriously and followed up by the authorities.
I apologise for being a few minutes late.
In Glasgow, the vulnerable young persons procedures follow the format for child protection procedures. To begin with, there is a multi-agency case discussion to determine whether a young person’s case plan should be formalised under these procedures. That is very much about providing evidence, and the next step is a case conference. A core group of people is established to co-ordinate the young person’s care plan—
I understand that, but I am talking about the creation of the overall plan. I know that there are differences that will have to be reviewed, but how much of a role did the police play in the plan’s creation?
Very little. Indeed, I suppose that they have missed an opportunity in that respect. Traditionally, the police have come along very much with the purpose of providing information on the child’s criminality instead of thinking about the adult perpetrators with whom the child is involved and better ways of disrupting that activity. That trick has been missed; the police could play that clear role in those meetings instead of focusing on what the child is up to and how to minimise that activity. After all, there are other professionals present who can support that plan. The police should focus more on disrupting activity on the basis of information from the child on where they are hanging about or who they are hanging about with and the other information and observations that they have shared with staff and on thinking about whether they can use other techniques such as the harbouring notices that Martin Henry referred to. In Glasgow, the police are consulting legal services on how far they can go with harbouring notices with regard to abduction, because there has been a lot of information about young people being held against their will in flats.
I understand that, but again—forgive me if I am wrong—that is a reactive approach. You are asking for a national strategy, which is commendable, but we have a new regime with Police Scotland. I am struggling to find out where it could participate in creating that overarching national strategy.
Certainly every child protection committee should have police representation. That is where local strategies are developed for every community planning partnership area as well as child protection committee areas. However, in response to your question about the police taking a proactive approach, they are probably not there yet. That is primarily because child sexual exploitation has not been seen as a child protection issue and therefore we have not had the response from the police that we would have expected as regards the police being proactive.
Thank you for that. My next question is for Julian Heng and Martin Henry, but other panellists should feel free to come in.
For a considerable time, the issue of men who are experiencing a whole range of abuse issues has often been somewhat invisible. There could certainly be multiple reasons for that. Often, at NHS open road, where we predominantly work with adults, the men will disclose that they experienced childhood sexual abuse and were groomed and exploited into prostitution before the age of 18. They will often disclose that they did not feel comfortable making those disclosures until much later on, in their 20s.
I do not have much to add to that, except perhaps to say that, as you would expect, I see child sexual exploitation very much as only one manifestation of child sexual abuse. It is part of a much wider picture and we have to continually hold on to that. Child sexual exploitation is not a distinct set of behaviours. It falls under the umbrella of what we have always understood to be a range of behaviours known as child sexual abuse.
To pick up on one of Julian Heng’s points about the stigma of homophobia, many agencies will see boys’ experimentation in child sexual exploitation as part of exploring their sexuality when it is anything but. Agencies must be helped to try to respond to boys, because they often see the sexual activity rather than the abusive activity as the main theme.
I will finish my train of thought. One issue for me is how to prevent young men from becoming potential victims, for want of a better word, of child sexual exploitation, particularly, but also more widely, child sexual abuse. It seems to me that, if we are going to be successful with any prevention strategy, we need to see young men as a particular target group and to start to frame our messages around how they understand the issue rather than just do that in a general way, which is often predicated on a model that is more effective for girls and women than for men. If we are to prevent that more successfully, we need to start to think more smartly about how young men understand the messages and tailor them accordingly.
Thank you very much. I am conscious of the time, so I turn to my colleagues. The next question is for Liz Ray.
My question relates to young people who are looked after in residential settings. In its evidence, Who Cares? Scotland highlighted that a number of young people rebel against the restrictions that are placed on them in residential units; they might run away and spend time with unsafe people who will go on to abuse them or exploit them. How should we design residential settings so that they are welcoming and appealing to those young people, given that there must always be boundaries and restrictions?
I have to be honest and say that that is a really difficult question. Most of the residential settings that I have found myself in have been welcoming to and supportive of young people. Young people’s prior experiences impact on whether they can take support from units’ staff. Relationships are offered.
Do any other panel members have anything to add?
It must be recognised that when young people are accommodated for the first time they may be extremely distressed about leaving their families. No matter what the setting is—foster care or a residential children’s unit—the placement becomes part of the problem for the young person. It is hard for them to develop a trusting relationship with people whom they blame for their being in that position in the first place.
I agree. We must remember that the young people who are accommodated in the care system do not come in without baggage—they come with a history of experiences that sometimes, as we have heard, do not equip them to be receptive to care and support, particularly when that is planned and structured and includes discipline and boundaries.
My question follows on from Jim Eadie’s question on Australia and people who find themselves in residential care. There has been criticism of staff’s failure to monitor properly the children in their care. We have heard evidence that young people can disappear for anything up to two to four hours without that being reported to the authorities. Are you aware of any measures that staff take to monitor who the young people may be meeting and what cars regularly pick them up? What longer-term measures are in place?
Young people in residential care units often have free time—they go out with their friends at night and weekends, they visit their families and they may be allowed to be in the community, depending on what order they are on. Provided that no issue has been raised in the past, young people are free to come and go at will. That is reasonable for the majority of young people.
Residential units—this is not a general assertion—can be targeted by predators. How do you protect the young people in the units, in particular when the unit is not in their home town or region? They may be in a care unit outwith the areas where they usually hang about. How do we ensure that appropriate action is being taken to deal with predators who target young people in areas where they know they are vulnerable?
A couple of issues that we have dealt with involve people turning up in cars to pick young people up late at night. They communicate with young people through Facebook or online. It is a nightmare to even contemplate how you would manage that. Very often they do not meet close to the unit; the young person just disappears and the staff do not know where they have gone. Such people are clever enough not to turn up at the door. There are examples of staff phoning the police because they know that such a person is in the area. These people cover their tracks really well when it comes to residential settings. They would be easy to identify if they were too prominent in the vicinity of the unit.
Do you believe that residential staff underuse the powers that they have or is your argument that we need to have new powers?
I do not think that staff underuse the powers that they have. Their powers are very limited; young people have rights and if staff are too punitive, the young people contact organisations such as ours to challenge their being kept in the unit. Keeping them in is fine for a night or so, but we have worked with young people who have been kept in for three weeks solid. If they are not under a place-of-safety warrant they are not secured, so we have to advocate that they be allowed some time in the community.
In the evidence that we have received, there has been quite a bit of discussion of definitions of child sexual exploitation. Do the definitions currently help or hinder efforts to protect young people? Is it helpful to distinguish CSE from childhood sexual abuse in general?
I might as well warm everybody up. The answer to the last part of your question is no: I do not think that CSE is distinct from childhood sexual abuse. There are a number of different manifestations of such behaviour, and we know that not only adults behave in a particularly abusive way towards young people or children; some children and young people also behave in that way. The picture is complex.
Barnardo’s lodged the petition, and the fact that we have had lots of information in relation to the Jimmy Savile inquiry in particular has sharpened the focus on child sexual abuse and child sexual exploitation. Barnardo’s focus has never been about one or the other, but is about recognising that child sexual exploitation is different, in the sense that it tends to be non-familial people who are involved in the abuse and exploitation of the child. Barnardo’s feels that child sexual exploitation has been under the radar for too long.
You talked about identifying places where the police suspect sexual predators are active. A number of years ago I used to drive through Glasgow on a Saturday afternoon and I was really surprised by the number of young males in cars hanging about outside what the young people call unders clubs, talking to young females. I was concerned about the situation. We have not heard about instances in Scotland that are similar to what happened in Rochdale, Oxford and other areas down south. We need to investigate further.
That is why we need a national strategy, which identifies the full spectrum of support that is required and charges someone with monitoring each activity. There needs to be an action plan for each activity, whether we are talking about raising awareness among parents, residential workers and young people, disrupting activity or providing appropriate support to young people. I am thinking about prevention as well as intervention.
You were talking about a national strategy. How much contact have you had internationally? This is not just a Scottish problem.
Do you mean contact internationally with agencies or with young people?
I mean contact with people who are trying to address the problem.
Barnado’s has been involved in the European Daphne research funding programme. Over the past 10 years, we have been able to link up with services in the Netherlands and Estonia. That was very much about looking at research and practice, and developing and sharing our practice to ensure that any support that we were offering young people was the best that it could be.
What are the most important ways in which the statutory sector and the criminal justice system in Scotland can work collaboratively with the voluntary sector to combat CSE? Can you give any concrete examples?
On law enforcement, now that we have a single police force for Scotland, there may be aspects of what the police have traditionally done that the voluntary sector may be able to do more cheaply and, potentially, more effectively, which would free up police time to focus on other areas. One example is the return-home interview that I was talking about earlier. That intelligence-gathering exercise—if you want to call it that—could effectively be undertaken by voluntary sector agencies. That is part of the pilots and is a practical example of what would traditionally have been seen as a police activity, but which could be done effectively by the voluntary sector. There are probably plenty more such examples, particularly from a prevention point of view.
First of all, there has to be a cultural shift. Let me give you an example. I mentioned that Barnardo’s shared information with Police Scotland—in fact, it was Strathclyde Police, because it was prior to April—about 30 victims and 10 perpetrators. The police went away and pulled together a core group of people to talk about a victim strategy and start to progress interviews. I was invited to a meeting yesterday—it was the fourth meeting that had taken place. What I got was, “I’m really sorry we never invited you, Daljeet. We forgot”, even though it was Barnardo’s that had given them the information in the first place. Already sitting there was social work, health and education. There has to be a cultural shift towards valuing the work of the voluntary sector and the key role that we play, both in terms of having the information to begin with and in terms of the relationships that we have with families and children.
I would echo Daljeet Dagon’s points and reaffirm that the potential benefit of a national strategy is that it would afford an opportunity to co-ordinate the various stakeholders in the strategy. It would also afford us the opportunity to accurately frame the experience of child sexual exploitation and have that common understanding between all the stakeholders who are acting in the strategy. I am thinking about how that would have a knock-on effect on prevention, identification and support.
I totally agree with my colleagues’ comments, but I would make the point that we really need to raise awareness among the public about what child sexual exploitation is. Many staff do not know what it is; they see it as behaviour of children. If people who have been trained do not understand it, how can we expect the public to understand it? For looked-after children, there is a massive stigma about being looked after. That stigma is magnified if you are a looked-after young person who is also being sexually exploited in the community. The public could safeguard young people if they were aware of the issues, but they are quite often oblivious.
Thank you all very much for your evidence. I am sorry that we are having to stop—we could have continued for another hour or two. Your experience is invaluable in helping us to judge what we will recommend for the future. I thank you again for coming along and answering the questions so helpfully. You are welcome to stay, although I know that you are all busy people and I am sure that you have other things to do. However, if you wish to stay, please feel free to sit in the gallery.
We come to the second panel of witnesses under agenda item 2. I apologise for Mr Stewart, who has left us briefly. I welcome Ken Dunbar of the Aberlour Child Care Trust; Rosina McCrae from Say Women; Linda Thompson from the Women’s Support Project; and Anela Anwar, head of projects at roshni.
That is an interesting question. One of our greatest challenges is to get the optimum use of our refuge, when we know fine well that a large number of children and young people run away from home. Over the years, we have tried to work with the local authorities and all agencies, including the police, to get right not just the refuge, but the whole system of engagement with young people, including things such as return home welfare interviews, and the whole process of trying to look after a child. There has not been enough appreciation of the importance of a refuge and an intense period of support for children who have been pushed into a runaway situation.
I have a small supplementary question, before I bring in John Wilson. Such situations are not just statistics, but what analysis is done of the reasons why children run away? Is there a series of reasons or is there a focus on one or two? Do you do that sort of counselling feedback?
Yes, we do. Recently, to get a more detailed understanding of why the refuge is not being used as much as we would like—as I said, it has been a struggle—we have been looking at the cases that are coming in and at cases in which contact is made but the referral is not followed through. The aim is to start to understand the reasons why people do not use the refuge as a place of safety.
Can you demonstrate what you mean by “clearly”?
Yes, indeed. In a number of areas, we have had no doubt that sexual abuse has taken place in the familial environment in the home. We have had to try to support the children and young people affected and get them into refuge. One of Aberlour’s range of services is the ability to look at the specialist fostering side and, indeed, residential care. We can try to make connections in that regard and see whether we can provide a far more appropriate response to the young person.
You said in your written evidence that you have only a three-bed unit to deal with runaways. Can you give us a figure—I understand that it will be an estimate—of how many young people run away each year? Is one three-bed unit sufficient to deal with the issues that young runaways have?
That is an interesting question. We believe that one out of nine children runs away from home each year—that is the statistic that is used regularly—but we are still lucky if we achieve a 30 per cent occupancy rate in a refuge. You might say that there is a mismatch between provision and need, but it is about the system connecting and whether the referral processes are right and there is support in the right area at the right time to enable young people to get to a place of safety. Undoubtedly, that has been a key challenge for us. We have had a number of years of difficulty in understanding whether we can continue to run a refuge when it is not used as effectively as it could be by the various agencies that can refer.
May I come in at this point, convener?
Yes, of course.
As Ken Dunbar said, whether there is sufficient accommodation is a good question. Say Women provides accommodation to young homeless women. Two factors are involved for runaways, one of which is that, when they are old enough, they run away from family abuse and become homeless, which means that they face further problems; the other factor is that to deal with the abuse within the family, the young women develop coping strategies such as alcohol and drug use, which become a problem in the family and they are then thrown out.
That was an important contribution. Thank you.
Yes.
Can young people—or, in fact, do young people—refer themselves to the refuge?
They can. There are some self-referrals. They are often people who have been connected and know the system better. You should bear it in mind that our refuge is one of the most secret places in Scotland and it will remain that way, but the answer is yes. There are self-referral mechanisms.
I have a question for Anela Anwar about protecting minority ethnic victims. What are the key ingredients or factors in working sensitively to protect minority ethnic victims of CSE, including work with trafficked young people and refugees? How might we address any perpetrators from particular minority ethnic backgrounds?
It is a complex question. I will do my best not to take two hours to answer it. Essentially, there needs to be a multifaceted approach. First and foremost, there needs to be recognition among service providers and statutory services that minority ethnic young people are victims of exploitation. At present, the focus is very much on other groups. That is not to negate their experiences or say that it does not happen within those groups, but the focus is taken away from minority ethnic young people. Often, they will not be looked after or accommodated. They will be in safe and secure homes, and different models of exploitation will be used to exploit them. First, there needs to be that recognition that minority ethnic young people are vulnerable and are victims of exploitation.
Yes, I understand that. My question related to the ethnic minority situation. How do you see that? For example, how do we look at perpetration without either being culturally insensitive or, in case we might create racial tensions, taking no action against abusers?
That goes back to what I said at the start. There needs be a recognition that exploitation happens across boundaries. Victims come from all communities and ethnicities and the individuals who exploit them come from various ethnic backgrounds themselves. I know that there has been a lot of focus and media attention on minority ethnic groups and specific models of grooming. However, we do not have the research or the data sets to say whether there is a specific trend. We need to take away the focus from a certain group, community or ethnicity in order to engage minority ethnic communities in community outreach and awareness-raising discussions, both in prevention and in recovery afterwards, to try to build stepping stones to what we are all seeking to do—namely, have an efficient national strategy and prevent exploitation within communities.
I understand that. I am sorry to continue to probe, but is there a national strategy that one size fits all, or are there deviations that we have to recognise as part of that, because of the perpetration that might happen?
I think that the national strategy has to take account, both during investigation and in recovery work afterwards, of culture-specific issues that can create more vulnerable situations for young people in ethnic minorities to be exploited. We need to tackle the fact—and the national strategy has to explicitly state—that those who exploit young people, and their victims, come from all ethnicities and communities. We cannot focus on one ethnic minority, because that is unhelpful and causes community tension. If we just look at one area, we will leave that area vulnerable. Are we saying that we will not look for different models of sexual exploitation, we will not look for perpetrators who do not come from minority ethnic communities and we will not look for victims who are from minority ethnic communities? We have to ensure that we look across the board in formulating a national strategy and our approach to how we prevent child sexual exploitation and support survivors afterwards.
There is no question of stigmatisation. Can you blame us if we ask about and probe every corner of this particularly difficult issue?
I have something to add that I think is useful. Ann Coffey, chair of the all-party parliamentary group for runaway and missing children and adults that reports at Westminster, recently asked a crux-of-the-matter question. As she said, we have to look at the perpetrators. Clearly, we know that the vast majority of perpetrators are men. The national strategy cannot ignore a gendered approach. As Ann Coffey asked, and as Jim Gamble—of whose work with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre many of us will have heard—asked in the media last week, what is turning our boys and young men into perpetrators? We have to look at how notions of power, entitlement, right and privilege are being given to our boys and men in a way that creates a system in which we have impacted on our boys and young men. We have to step back and not necessarily focus so much on race, religion and culture. We need to look at the culture in Scotland that feeds the idea and perpetuates the myth; we have to link that across to violence against women and ensure that the notion of gender also runs through the strategy to tackle child sexual exploitation.
My question follows the convener’s line of questioning. How do we protect young people in the Asian community when they identify and report child sexual exploitation? From the national debate, we know about the gangs that have been reported and prosecuted in various towns and cities throughout England. The committee is trying to ensure that all young people in Scotland have the same opportunity to identify and report child sexual exploitation in their community, no matter who is involved and no matter the race or gender of the individuals carrying out those acts. We need a way of addressing child sexual exploitation no matter what community it is taking place in. Are we getting the message right? Are we addressing the issues in ethnic minority communities? We know that trafficking is also an issue in some ethnic minority communities.
Child sexual exploitation takes place across the board of minority ethnic communities, not just in Asian communities, so the response should be across the board. We need to create culturally sensitive safe spaces in which minority ethnic young people feel able to come forward and disclose. A huge range of research, including research that we have conducted, has shown that minority ethnic communities do not feel safe with or confident about and do not trust mainstream service providers. For that reason, they are often not picked up but remain hidden or invisible to those services. They will not come forward and report.
As a specialist service for young homeless women, our ability to offer a safe refuge to young people from ethnic minorities has been poor. We are not good at it despite producing leaflets and everything else, so the establishment is roshni. The research has shown that the support must come from the minority ethnic community itself. That is the benefit of projects such as roshni, certainly in Glasgow, which has Scotland’s biggest minority ethnic population. The work that roshni is doing is excellent, and that is the only way in which it can be done. The mainstream services have failed certain groups along with disabled people—we are not good at supporting them, either. We need specialist services that are run by people in the minority ethnic communities, who are sensitive to those communities. Like roshni, they must challenge the men in those communities who are abusing the young boys and girls.
I want to touch on some aspects of cultural sensitivity. We run a guardianship service, and a large percentage of the young people who come into contact with that service have been trafficked. We help them to navigate the legal framework and establish a life in an area, but a number of technical and legal things could be done to improve the situation. There could be a better appreciation of the cultural sensitivity that is required among all the people who are involved, which means that we need a good mix of people who are engaged or employed by us to work with young people and understand their circumstances. That goes right through to the technical issue of interpreting. We will not understand everything that is said, and sometimes things can be interpreted differently. We need to get the interpretation absolutely right.
I want to go back to what I said about community outreach and engagement. It is essential that we have specialist organisations and safe spaces in which minority ethnic young people can disclose. However, we also need a community outreach campaign to address the cultural barriers. It is not just about the language barrier; there are issues of honour, shame and other cultural issues that prevent young people from coming forward. Also, families and communities close down and do not support the young people. We must ensure that we are reaching the young people and taking out that step of the family or wider community, so that they know where they can go directly and can have trust and confidence in the services. Without the community outreach alongside the specialist support, the approach will not work.
As I said, we could spend hours, if not days, discussing this subject but I am conscious of the time and want to move on. Jim Eadie has a question for Ken Dunbar and Rosina McCrae.
It is the same question that I asked Liz Ray of Who Cares? Scotland on the previous panel, and it relates to young people who are looked after in residential settings. Many of those young people rebel against the restrictions that are in place and may run away to unsafe people who, at first, appear to treat them as equals and allow them a degree of freedom but who go on to abuse them. How should we design residential settings and safe places to run to that are more appealing and welcoming to those young people?
I advocate the approach that the Aberlour Child Care Trust has taken to residential care, augmenting it with throughcare and aftercare. We work on giving young people confidence that they have a home for life. Clearly, it is not a home for life, but we maintain a connection with the young people, which creates an attachment with those whom we work with for a long time. We are fortunate that people have stayed with the organisation in that setting for a long time, and there has been a real connection with some of the young people who have come through the care system.
My question is for Rosina McCrae, as well.
I agree with much of what Ken Dunbar said. A commitment to seeing the young person and a recognition of the sexual abuse element are needed. We would not separate off child sexual exploitation from child sexual abuse, because they are not mutually exclusive. Men who abuse in families are just as likely to abuse and target other young boys and girls outside. The experience of our young women is that they have been in more than one abusive situation, ranging from prostitution to other things. We need to be aware that the more technology develops, the more we will discover new things—I watch too much science fiction to say what they could be. Therefore, we should stop trying to look at the distinction. We have a good definition of childhood sexual abuse, and child sexual exploitation includes the sexual abuse of young women.
I do not wish to be rude, but we have a limited amount of time, so I ask people to be brief with their questions and answers, albeit that the answers are very interesting.
I will be brief, but Jim Eadie raises an important issue about residential settings, given that we know about the vulnerability of young people in care, and we are clearly getting it wrong. It is also about the size of the units—they have to be small.
You make the point that we are not getting it right. You have a particular perspective, given that you run a women-only space. Do you have the sense that you have more success than other residential settings in engaging with, in your case, young women who run away from a residential setting to an unsafe place? Are you more successful in engaging with them and bringing them back into a safe environment?
I reiterate my plea for brevity—it is important, as we have several things to get through.
There is probably a lack of research in that area. All that I know is that even in residential care young women are more likely to experience sexual exploitation and abuse within the unit. Women-only projects are useful alongside mainstream provision. We need both.
I missed out quite an important point. I was struck by Daljeet Dagon’s point about some organisations knowing exactly what is happening in a locality but not being invited to the table when information is shared. It is crucial that third sector organisations are seen as trusted advisers in the information-sharing process. Most of the information or soft intelligence that is needed for the right intervention to take place is understood on the front line. A lack of respect is perhaps sometimes shown in relation to the type of information that the third sector could feed in to enable the statutory sector to respond in the right way.
What are the mechanisms for doing that?
There are case review sessions. I listened to the point that was made about the essential collection of evidence—it was probably not a case review—in a community setting. The first point of contact should have been the third sector groups that were involved to ensure that the information was collected. Such an approach would make it possible to triangulate what the statutory sector knows along with what the third sector and voluntary groups know about the local area. That process needs to work far more effectively. I do not think that a system is in place to enable that to happen. I know that there are community planning partnerships and so on, but the work is done at neighbourhood level and the process needs to work differently.
My question is for Rosina McCrae and Linda Thompson. Both your organisations stress the central importance of understanding and working actively with gender-based analysis. Can you give the committee a few brief examples—given the time constraints—of the work that needs to be done to prevent and address CSE, where it will be particularly important to change attitudes to young women? Do the recent reports of perceived prejudices that left young women unprotected in some of the cases that have taken place in England highlight the need for that work to be done?
I will try to be brief, because I know that we are running over time.
In the interests of brevity, I simply say that I agree with every single word of that. [Laughter.]
Thank you—that was kind of you.
I agree with the earlier comment that we could do with a few more hours to cover the issue with the two panels of witnesses.
There is debate around whether child sexual exploitation is just a particular manifestation of child sexual abuse. In working with parents, young people and professionals, I find useful the definition of child sexual exploitation that takes in the notion of gifts in kind and the exchange of goods such as mobile phones, as well as housing, shelter, safety and other resources. That is useful in helping people to understand the specific dynamics that can exist around child sexual exploitation. As Scotland moves forward, we must look carefully at how we frame notions of choice in our definitions.
I reiterate something that was said earlier. It is great to have a definition, but if people are not aware of it, what is the point? We need awareness among front-line staff and in the community. Child sexual exploitation is definitely part of childhood sexual abuse, but we need to be clear that sexual exploitation has its own dynamics and circumstances, as Linda Thompson said. Staff need to be aware of that and to have that sea change of opinion, away from the view that young people, or young girls, are making their own choices. It is about power and control, and we need to raise awareness about that across the board.
I do not think that the distinction is helpful at all. Childhood sexual abuse has evolved. I am old enough, unfortunately, to remember when it was much more one dimensional, but technology has changed things. It was bad enough when mobile phones were being used to transmit images of women being raped and sexually abused. Now such material is available wholesale on the net, and children have access to it.
Do you see no distinction between childhood sexual abuse and child sexual exploitation?
No, I see no distinction at all. Linda Thompson is right to make the point that, given the way that young women are brought up and given the way that young boys are socialised, there is confusion at what we might call the minor end. However, that is not minor in relation to how girls see themselves in society and how boys see themselves and girls in society. What we are dealing with is masculinity. In making such a distinction, we are certainly not doing girls and women any favours, but we are not doing boys and men any favours either.
I agree with everything that has been said. Child sexual exploitation and childhood sexual abuse should be treated as part of a continuum. As I said earlier, we need to ensure that we get out the right education and prevention messages about healthy relationships. If education does not start at that earlier age, we will continue to struggle to help young people, and teenagers in particular, to make sense of their lives and relationships, some of which will be potentially abusive. I do not see any clear distinction between the two.
Thank you. I am conscious of the time, so we will move on to our last question.
Looking forward, can you give concrete examples of how statutory criminal justice services can best work with the voluntary sector?
I go back to my earlier point about information sharing providing a better analysis. We have talked about the downside of the internet and social media, but the positive side is that those give us data, which we need to interpret and use to ensure that we take the right route in our interventions. The statutory bodies, the third sector and all those involved who need to be able to understand what is happening in the area must be able to share information. Neighbourhood-based sharing of information will help the right interventions to be made at the right time for every young person who could be affected. That is a key message that I want to get across. I feel that we are failing to grasp how much information we have that we can use to make interventions at the right time.
For us, the examples are patchy—that is the most depressing thing—as partnership working depends on individuals. We are dealing with big forces. In the statutory sector, I think that health faces a particular problem. We find health professionals obstructive and very negative and dismissive of the voluntary sector. It is difficult for us to become involved in care reviews of the young people we are involved with because health people do not see us as professional. They ask what qualifications our staff have and so on. With a bit of force, we can try to get involved but we are not as successful there as in other areas. Social work and the police are much more involved in partnership working than health is. That is a big issue.
I think that you are moving us on to another issue.
No, I am not. Anne McTaggart asked me about the criminal justice system. I think that we should look at minimum sentencing to ensure that we send out a clear message to abusers.
We will finish with Linda Thompson and Anela Anwar.
I come from a slightly different angle because a lot of my work is about prevention, education and awareness raising, but let me share an example in which the multi-agency approach has worked particularly well. In central Scotland and in Perth and Kinross, we have linked in with police, education, criminal justice social work and the voluntary sector—all the partners have come together—to run quite large-scale awareness-raising and public-education events. Over the course of four days, 2,100 parents and carers came along to an event to hear information about internet safety, sexualisation, gender, sexual roles, violence against women and sexual exploitation. That is an example not of how to deal with criminal justice and the police but of how multiple agencies can come together to engage effectively with local communities and parents.
To give another concrete example, we deliver a project called SAFE that works with young people from six to 16. The project delivers messages for other organisations, so we have engaged with a range of agencies, including the police and health, which cannot access those communities on the issues that I described. We take their messages, make them culturally sensitive and put them out to ensure that those communities are not missed out.
We must stop there, as we are way over time. This has been a very interesting session. Thank you very much not just for your verbal commentary but for your written submissions, which will give us a foundation in going forward with our analysis. As I said earlier, I wish that we had two days on the issue, never mind 20 or 40 minutes. Thank you very much.
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