Current status: Answered by Natalie Don-Innes on 27 October 2025
To ask the Scottish Government whether it will recognise peer-on-peer harmful sexual behaviour as a safeguarding priority.
The Scottish Government is committed to preventing all types of harmful sexual behaviour involving children and young people. We recognise that children and young people displaying harmful sexual behaviour are a complex group with diverse needs which cannot be addressed by a ‘one size fits all’ model of service provision.
To inform our response, Scottish Government set up a Harmful Sexual Behaviour Delivery Group which carried out work to deliver on the recommendations made by the Expert Group on Preventing Sexual offending Involving Children and Young People in 2020.
As part of this work the group developed a detailed guidance document, published in 2024: Working with children and young people who have displayed Harmful Sexual Behaviour: Evidence based guidance for professionals working with children and young people, which focuses on contextual safeguarding, assessment and intervention. The guidance provides professionals with the information and tools to identify what sexual behaviour in children and young people is harmful, steps they should take if they identify harmful behaviour, and what approaches can help to support prevention of this behaviour. The guidance also includes practical case studies with examples of behaviours and steps taken to mitigate harm when a child has presented behaviour which could be harmful to another child.
The Scottish Government also fund the Lucy Faithfull Foundation Scotland and the Children and Young People's Centre for Justice to run a regular forum for practitioners working with children and young people, to support them to identify and intervene when children and young people display harmful sexual behaviour.