Safeguarding Children from Sexual Exploitation: The Role of the Social Worker

Safeguarding Children from Sexual Exploitation: The Role of the Social Worker

1.1 Background and Rationale

It is proposed that this paper will look at the role of the social worker in safeguarding children from sexual exploitation, in respect of their legal duties, policies and practices, and what can be done to prevent such exploitation in the context of the United Kingdom. The abuse and sexual exploitation of children is, of course, an omnipresent concern in contemporary society, and there is thus no shortage of reports of such abhorrent news stories in the mass media. For example, around a decade ago in 2010, five men from Rotherham were jailed for sexual offences against underage teenage girls (BBC News, 2015, n.p.). However, according to the BBC News (2015, n.p.), this proved to be only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, so to speak, and two years after their arrest, in 2012, an investigation by a journalist for The Times newspaper found that thousands of such crimes were being committed each year by a network of Asian men in South Yorkshire; and following this, some 29 people were charged with child exploitation offences in Rotherham alone after an inquiry found that 1,400 children had been abused over a 16-year period (Martinson, 2014, n.p.). As such, it is clear that more needs to be done to protect children from such exploitation in the UK, working within the legislative framework of the Children Act 1989, which underpins the current child protection system in England and Wales. Therefore, this study aims to examine how children can be better safeguarded from sexual exploitation in the years to come, and to specifically look at what the role of the social worker might be in this.

Recently, the UK government vowed to spend £40 million on tackling child sexual abuse in Britain, with this money being used to try to protect youngsters from exploitation and trafficking, and to hunt down offenders (Sheldrick, 2017, n.p.). In recent years, there have also been a spate of high profile cases of child sex abuse, including the involvement of children’s TV celebrities such as Jimmy Savile (Halliday, 2014, n.p.) and Rolf Harris (Evans, 2014, n.p.), while the trafficking of children in the UK and beyond for sexual exploitation has been revealed to be a big problem (Hollington, 2013, n.p.). Indeed, this has become such a big controversy in recent times, that Hollington (2013) has stated that: “The system currently in place to protect vulnerable children from sexual exploitation is so inadequate it is almost as if a sexual predator had designed it. It is contributing to the trafficking and abuse of children instead of preventing it” (n.p.). This then, is a damning indictment of the current system that is in place. However, the Director of the National Crime Agency’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection, Will Kerr, has said that: “The additional funding [recently pledged by the UK government] will strengthen and enhance our victim identification and child protection adviser capabilities, to target the most serious child sexual exploitation offenders” (Hollington, 2013, n.p.). Therefore, it seems that there is now an acknowledgement of the sexual abuse that children have suffered both in the present epoch, and in the past in the UK, and that there is enough government, media, and public support to now do something meaningful about it.

Furthermore, to add to the child sex abuse that has been occurring within British borders, it has also recently been revealed that for several decades, UK children have been sent across the world to new lives in institutions in which they were sexually abused. In fact, Symonds (2017) reports for the BBC News that British is perhaps the only country in the world that has exported vast numbers of its children, with an estimated 150,000 children being sent abroad over a 350 year period to places all over the world; but among these, hundreds of migrant children suffered from maltreatment and sexual abuse. However, it is only relatively recently that people have started to come forward in any real numbers to recount their experiences of abuse as a child. For example, one investigation into Fairbridge Farm School in Molong in Australia found that 60% of children at the school were sexually abused, which is a study based upon some one hundred interviews (Symonds, 2017). However, until now, it seems that institutions have covered up such historical child abuse cases. As such, current cases of child sex abuse must be considered in this historical context, as this is by no means a new phenomenon, but something that has been going on for many centuries. Ergo, the breadth and scope of child sex abuse in the UK that has been revealed in recent years acts as a firm rationale for conducting this study; so that this body of knowledge can be added to, and so that the role of the social worker can specifically be examined in safeguarding children f