Issue - items at meetings - Sexual Exploitation of Children: Response from Local Children's Safeguarding Board

Report of the Head of Law (Monitoring Officer) detailing the LSCB response to HWOSC requests for information (copy attached)

74.1         The Chair began by thanking the Local Safeguarding Children’s Board members and colleagues who had attended last committee to present the report. Due to the amount of time given to the A&E item last time, HWOSC did not have time to hear this report so it had been postponed until this committee.

74.2         Howard Baines, Local Safeguarding Children’s Board (LSCB) Manager, Rachel Brett (Director of Care & Support Services, Sussex Central YMCA) and Detective Chief Inspector Jeremy Graves, (Head of Crime Brighton and Hove) and chair of the CSE LSCB sub group) presented the report to HWOSC.

74.3         Mr Baines explained that child sexual exploitation (CSE) was high on the LSCB’s agenda, and key agencies in the city worked closely together to address the issue. CSE issues also link in with missing children and trafficked children. The LSCB coordinated training programmes for multi-agency staff including school staff and worked with school pupils. The school PSHE curriculum has been updated to include CSE.

CSE is now recognised as a safeguarding issue, which is a complete change from when it was considered to be a sign of promiscuous young people. There has been work to raise police officer awareness about CSE, for example, missing person interviews focus on CSE. The agenda report summarised the initiatives in place in the city.

74.4         Ms Brett gave an overview of the ‘What is Sexual Exploitation’ (WiSE) project. It began in 2010, following a pan Sussex report ‘Tipping the Iceberg’ (2007) by Barnardos. WiSE was established using the University of Bedfordshire’s ten recommendations for LSCB groups working with CSE.

In Brighton and Hove, following robust evidence gathering, agencies have a good idea of the levels of CSE in the city, and the methods being used by perpetrators. They cannot guarantee that there are no organised crime groups operating in the city but there is no indication that this is the case at present or in the past.

74.5         DCI Graves, who chairs the LSCB subgroup, told members that it was a very well represented group, with approximately thirty members covering a wide range of agencies in attendance. They had a well established process to capture any CSE cases in the city, meeting bi-weekly to share any information about cases. Services are joined up as much as they could be.

74.6         Committee members asked the LSCB representatives questions and comments:

74.7         Members asked about the numbers of children who are affected in Brighton and Hove?

Ms Brett said that at any one time, the WiSE project has about forty young people on their case books, with joint working with other agencies in the city due to capacity issues at WiSE. They have trained over 1000 professionals in identification and screening in CSE, and this has raised the number of referrals to WiSE accordingly. WiSE focus on higher threshold cases, so they hope that people who have been trained will be happy to deal with lower level cases themselves. Feedback has shown that people who have had training feel more confident in contacting WiSE to talk through their concerns and then refer the lower level cases on to the appropriate agencies or deal with it themselves.

The youngest person that WiSE has worked with was twelve; any children younger than this would initially be referred to ACAS, the information would be shared within the fortnightly meeting between Police , ACAS and WiSE in relation to care planning.

74.8         How can councillors be kept informed of what is happening in the city, eg any evidence of CSE crime gangs or other trends?

Graham Bartlett, Chair of LSCB, explained that Councillor Sue Shanks, Chair of the Children and Young People Committee (CYPC) sits on the LSCB and Mr Bartlett attends the CYPC so he is confident that the information is shared appropriately.

Superintendent Graves confirmed that the young people that had been seen so far had come through as individual cases not in clusters; there was no evidence that there had been any CSE criminal gangs operating.

74.9         Some members said that they had doubts over the council’s approach to CSE, particularly in the equalities profiling of potential perpetrators. There were a number of factors in Brighton and Hove that meant that CSE gangs could operate here, eg the night time economy, large number of takeaways and amusement arcades, a higher number of runaways coming to the city and so on.

The high profile CSE cases in other cities were largely caused by an unwillingness to upset community cohesion. Some members felt that this was reflected in the cover report for the CSE item, which addressed equalities implications for victims but not the possibility of potential perpetrators being from other equalities groups.

Members would therefore like reassurance that respect for cultural differences would not cloud the LSCB team from carrying out investigations.

Ms Brett said the LSCB was working to look at the night-time economy. From WiSE’s perspective, they were not afraid of challenging cultural groups but the fact remained that they had not seen anything of this nature happen to date. If the evidence was there, WiSE and partners would act robustly.

74.10    Members asked whether there had been a formal report of lessons learnt from Rochdale and other areas so far.

Superintendent Graves said that he was not aware that the report had been published but nevertheless, agencies were already working together to share learning, particularly through multi-agency safeguarding hub approaches, where agencies share all of the available information about a particular person.

74.11    Do school governors receive any safeguarding training?

Ms Brett said that there was safeguarding training for governors, which did cover CSE as well. WiSE can also offer bespoke training when requested.

74.12    Members asked how police performed in CSE cases locally.

Ms Brett said that there had been one particular successful prosecution recently, where the victim had learning disabilities. The police worked very well at putting support in for the victim and their family. The case resulted in the perpetrator getting fifteen years in prison.

74.13    What was the approach for tackling online CSE?

Ms Brett said that a member of staff had been trained by Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) to deliver specific training about online CSE.

74.14    The Healthwatch co-optee said that Healthwatch is able to represent children so they would welcome information about training opportunities. Superintendent Graves said that LSCB did not have a Healthwatch representative at present so they would welcome the input.

74.15    The HWOSC Chair concluded the item; he did not feel that it was necessary to establish a scrutiny panel at present as there was little value that could be added by a panel.

Other members said that they still had some concerns about the potential impact of not tackling perpetrators due to misplaced fear of affecting community cohesion, but they agreed that a panel was not necessary at present.

The Chair agreed to formally contact Councillor Shanks with members’ concerns and ask her to raise them with the LSCB. Councillor Shanks’ response will be brought back to HWOSC.

Report of the Head of Law (Monitoring Officer) detailing the LSCB response to HWOSC requests for information (copy attached)

This item was deferred until the next committee date.