Researching 'child sexual exploitation': a comparative perspective

'Child sexual exploitation' has become established as an urgent policy and practice concern more or less globally. In England this definition was introduced into statutory guidance on ‘child safeguarding’, first issued in... [ view full abstract ]

'Child sexual exploitation' has become established as an urgent policy and practice concern more or less globally.

In England this definition was introduced into statutory guidance on ‘child safeguarding’, first issued in 2009. This followed activist work designed to emphasise the rights of the child to protection. ‘Child sexual exploitation’ has taken on an especially potent status more recently in England. A series of statutory and other enquiries have been precipitated in response to media and public outrage at social work and police failures to tackle effectively more or less organised, gang and group-based patterns of sexual assault on children in local authority areas across the country. Concern about the apparent pervasiveness of 'child sexual exploitation' has come at a time when action has been demanded into associated failures historically to protect children from predatory adults operating in organised ways to abuse children, often in public care institutions.

Having become an urgent public and professional concern, 'child sexual exploitation' is now also an established topic of research interest in and beyond the social work academy in England. However, this urgency has meant that the significance of the problem as currently defined has yet to be subjected to the policy analysis necessary to situate the professional response within child welfare and criminal justice paradigms more generally.

In this presentation we will discuss findings of a desk-based, synthetic literature review of the origins and implications for social work of concerns about 'child sexual exploitation', as now defined in the English policy and practice context and understood within a comparative, international frame of reference.