Responses, recognition and reciprocity

This chapter considers what the participants had to say about responding to CSE. This chapter considers the importance of recognition, reciprocity and interdependency – specifically in the context of care and care relationships – and also signals to the need to acknowledge the wider context surrounding sexual exploitation.

Risk

This chapter explores the different ways that the two groups of participants conceptualised young people’s risky behaviours and risk to CSE. Drawing on the concepts of childhood and youth, the chapter considers the difficulties that the professionals displayed, and talked about themselves, in making sense of young people’s agency and involvement in CSE, and considers how this was different from the ways in which young people made sense of (what is perceived by others as) risks and risky behaviours.

Vulnerabilities

In this chapter attention is given over to the wider context surrounding young people’s experiences, and why or how it is that some young people are vulnerable to being sexually exploited. The chapter considers that unmet needs are essential to a full understanding of CSE. Inadequate care (relationships, systems and acts), lack of opportunity for reciprocal relationships, unacknowledged agency and feelings of being object were considered to be at the root of the exploitative relationships and circumstances in which young people were involved.

Exchange and abuse

This chapter outlines the different ways in which ‘CSE’ was understood to occur. It considers how grooming may not always feature and, when used definitively as a model, is inadequate for understanding how sexual exploitation occurs. Building on previous discussion, this chapter considers how for some young people exchanging sex can be a coping response to other difficulties, and a way of feeling as subject. In considering these different models for understanding CSE, the chapter argues that the element of exchange is fundamental to each, and suggests that exchange is what makes sexual exploitation particular and distinct from other forms of sexual abuse.

Conclusion: child sexual exploitation – agency, abuse and exchange

In this chapter, the three key arguments made throughout the book are drawn together. First, CSE is wider than the individual instances of sexual exploitation or sexually exploitative relationships, and ‘care’ (relationships, systems and acts) sits at the crux of the problem of CSE. Second, conceptions of CSE may be problematic for young people, particularly with regards to understanding and framing young people’s agency, and the chapter considers the implications that this has for responses to the problem. Third, intrinsic to CSE is the element of exchange, and underpinning this is the meeting (and exploitation) of unmet needs. This concluding chapter suggests how this approach provides a way of making sense of both young people’s agency, and the abuse they experience, through exchanging sex. It concludes by arguing that the language and concept of ‘CSE’ is both narrow and narrowing, misdirecting the focus of the problem, serving to exclude some young people while also having serious implications for responses to and interventions for CSE and other forms of sexual abuse.

From ‘child prostitution’ to ‘child sexual exploitation’: an overview

This chapter sets out the historical and contemporary representations of CSE and the ways in which the terminology and definitions of the problem have changed within policy frameworks, which have influenced and continued to influence how this issue is defined and responded to. This provides a context for the discussion that follows in later chapters by providing an analysis of the sets of ideas within which CSE has come to ‘exist’; signalling toward problems arising from the current conceptualisation of CSE.

Introduction

An overview of what we understand by child sexual exploitation and how it differs from child sexual abuse. The structure and content of the book are defined as well as the research participants and their involvement. Ethics and reflexivity are also discussed.