National Child Exploitation Awareness Day
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Today is National Child Exploitation Awareness Day. With this year's theme of preventing abuse through exploitation by working in partnership, we wanted to share the work our Founder & CEO, Abi, has recently done in collaboration with the London Innovation and Improvement Alliance (LIIA).
LIIA has produced a Safeguarding Adolescence in London (SAIL) Toolkit where you can find a range of expert opinions, tools and resources to support your safeguarding efforts. Abi was really pleased to contribute a written piece on practice with girls and young women, highlighting their unique and often missed, or misunderstood, experiences.
"The fact that girls and young women are missing from offending, gang and knife crime data is critical. The distinctly different ways these issues affect their lives are rendered invisible, and as a result the systems and services built to address them are not designed with young women and girls in mind."
Abi suggests that a gendered understanding of girls and young women's experiences might prevent adolescent young women’s experiences of sexual exploitation being missed by professionals, and prevent escalated harm. She encourages a professional curiosity of young women's experiences - and cautions that an absence of this risks mistaking the grooming, coercion and control that they experience, as young women being complicit, ‘promiscuous’, or having sex with older men because they have ‘chosen’ to.
She urges for an intersectional analysis of young women's experiences - knowing that the way that Black girls can be subject to adultification lessens recognition of their vulnerability, and can result in less support or protection.
And we know only too well that young women’s ‘survival behaviour’ is misunderstood, misinterpreted and often results in a punitive and criminal response from those who could help her. This might include angry and violent ‘outbursts’ in school, or when she’s not getting what she needs from services; engaging in risky sexualised behaviour as a way of avoiding further harm; bringing in friends and other girls as a way to divert harmful attention from herself; carrying drugs and weapons for partners, family or friends in the complicated context of her relationships."
We know that partnerships and networks are the only way we can work to prevent exploitation and abuse. The harm young women experience is often networked and includes multiple perpetrators - our partner and multidisciplinary response must be rigorous and high quality.
Abi also recorded a video on the concept of Participation is Protection, where she explains how, without committing to participatory practice, safeguarding can often unintentionally replicate the very dynamics of control, coercion and powerlessness that young women experience.
We adhere to the principle that we cannot just work with individuals to bring about lasting and sustainable change, but that we must take an ecological approach. This means working in the spaces and places to increase safety using principles of contextual safeguarding; we endeavour to bring about practice and service change through our national training programmes; and, working alongside young women with lived experience to influence policy and wider systems change.
On National Child Exploitation Awareness Day, we ask you to consider how the theme of working in partnership to prevent abuse can be enacted with both professionals and young people. Young women are our greatest resource and most important partner in our safeguarding efforts. Let's work together to ensure that girls and young women are free from oppression and harm caused by criminal exploitation and violence.
