A Note From Abi
Founder and CEO
Hello. Thanks for clicking the link and taking time to delve into the work we are doing here at Abianda! This quarter focuses on one of the four pillars of Abianda’s model: solution-focused practice.
This theme feels particularly relevant after a quarter in which much of our work has explored how systems understand and respond to girls and young women whose lives do not fit neatly within a single service. Much of my conversations and thinking has focused on what happens in systems and services that seem ‘stuck’, and not able to provide a collective response that responds sufficiently to the tangled experiences of trauma and the complexity of a young woman’s circumstances.
The challenge doesn’t seem to be that nobody knows the young woman. She is often known to several services and subject to repeated referrals, assessments and plans. The difficulty seems to be that each service can respond to one part of her life. This won't be unfamiliar to many, I am sure. We can often see the violence she is experiencing within a relationship being treated separately from criminal exploitation and associated 'survival offending', which is itself separated from what might be happening within her family, school, peer group or neighbourhood.
We work with brilliant professionals who are often trying their hardest within constrained resources, but the thread connecting the efforts, and connecting the young woman to the services, can be lost, or the nature of that thread isn’t quite right. We often see that the young woman can disappear beneath the different professional accounts of her. What is this ‘thread’ that will work for young women and girls?
The BBC documentary Britain’s Forgotten Girls brought some of the longstanding challenges (and awful failures) into public view. I thought this was a very good account of young women's experiences, and how they can be affected by exploitation and violence associated with ‘drug gangs’. The stories told, by incredibly brave young women, were nuanced and familiar. They described being sexually and criminally exploited as children, while systems misunderstood, minimised, ignored or divided up what was happening to them (BBC, 2026). These accounts reflect concerns that enquiries, young women, families and specialist organisations have raised over many years. Just last week I was talking to a family member who is at a loss as to how to get the right service response in place for a young woman we are working with, despite the harm she is experiencing being so acute. Another example of young women seemingly being 'too difficult' to help, and the system being stuck.
There have been important developments in the wider landscape. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 has created specific offences of child criminal exploitation and cuckooing, introduced a duty to report child sexual abuse and made grooming a statutory aggravating factor (Crime and Policing Act 2026; Home Office, 2026a).
The revised Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance gives greater recognition to the multiple harms children may experience simultaneously, including group-based exploitation, online harm, coercive control and abuse within intimate relationships. It also strengthens expectations around consistent practitioner relationships, multidisciplinary planning and anti-racist and anti-discriminatory practice (Department for Education, 2026).
The Government’s violence against women and girls action plan similarly emphasises prevention, earlier intervention and shared responsibility across government, public services and civil society (Home Office, 2026b). New research and guidance from the Youth Endowment Fund has also continued to make visible the scale of violence affecting children and the need for policing responses that begin by treating children as children (Youth Endowment Fund, 2026a; 2026b).
Piloting of the new Domestic Abuse Protection Orders (DAPOs) will soon come to an end and I am particularly interested to see the impact of the wider role out of these new powers. Different to a molestation order, these can be put in place by a wider body of individuals than just a judge, including the survivor. And breach of a DAPO is a criminal offence and carries a sentence. While these look like a positive development for the young women we work with who are over 18, we still have a big gap when it comes to understanding and responding to abuse in young people's relationships - especially when this intersects with ‘gangs’, exploitation and offending.
These developments are welcome. However, recognition in legislation and policy does not automatically create a coherent response around an individual young woman. The work continues!
