Understanding models of disability to improve responses to children with learning disabilities

This chapter explores the differences between a medical and a social model of disability to support application of these models to children with learning disabilities who experience, or are at risk of, child sexual exploitation (CSE). Medical knowledge about learning disabilities can support with assessment and understanding the physical symptoms that accompany a learning disability. The social model reinforces how social, cultural, material, and attitudinal barriers also form a disability and, in relation to children and young people with disabilities who experience, or are at risk of, CSE, highlight the importance of ensuring that this group, along with their non-disabled peers, have the support and opportunities to develop safe and healthy relationships. The chapter includes an overview of how disability intersects with abuse in general and CSE in particular. In addition, it draws upon evidence-based learning to consider how theory-informed services can identify children with learning disabilities affected by CSE and implement accessible services that deliver preventative and responsive practice to meet their needs.

Social support, empathy and ecology: a theoretical underpinning for working with young people who have suffered child sexual abuse or exploitation

This chapter presents three proposed theoretical frameworks that can be usefully applied in working in the field of child sexual abuse (CSA). It argues that the functions of empathy, social support and socialisation, and ecological theories can offer a theoretical framework to deal with the challenges associated with CSA and offers improved guidance for practice. The chapter then outlines three possible practice examples that could emerge from such an approach. In the discussion, the chapter considers how these three theoretical considerations can come together to offer direction for improving how CSA is understood and responded to with an emphasis on improving outcomes for children who experience sexual abuse. The discussion also looks at how these theoretical approaches can promote a preventative approach that tackles social and cultural as well as individual factors that result in such harmful abuse of children that it often has life-long negative impacts.

Understanding trauma and its relevance to child sexual exploitation

This chapter provides a brief overview of the research on trauma, specifically in relation to the impact of developmental and complex trauma and sexual abuse. An overview of the growing body of research on trauma-informed approaches to practice is also given. It considers how trauma responses are developed while enduring extreme stress, and how these responses may be evident among children and young people with child sexual exploitation (CSE) experiences. The chapter also considers how systems designed to protect and support traumatised children and young people often contribute to their re-traumatisation. It explores principles of trauma-informed practice that are useful in meeting the needs of young people victimised by CSE, discusses how trauma-informed approaches align with strengths-based and relationship-based approaches to CSE practice, and how such approaches can help practitioners understand and promote resilience.

Understanding adolescent development in the context of child sexual exploitation

This chapter considers a theoretical framework — lifespan developmental theory — which can assist in shedding light on the processes underlying human development. Lifespan development theory is an approach that explores particular challenges associated with different life stages, and identifies factors affecting adjustment across the lifespan. In the context of this theory, the chapter focuses in particular on adolescence as a developmental stage within the lifespan. The notion of transition is then explored, and this includes reference to puberty, brain development, and the variety of social and emotional changes that impact on the young person during this period. The chapter concludes by examining possible reasons why certain young people might be vulnerable in their early sexual relationships.

Contextual Safeguarding: theorising the contexts of child protection and peer abuse

This chapter presents the extra-familial dynamics of peer abuse against the familial parameters of child protection. Analysed through the constructivist structuralist concepts offered by Pierre Bourdieu, cumulative data from a multi-study programme into extra-familial abuse provides a roadmap towards identifying the components of a contextual account of, and response to, peer abuse. Through this process, it is possible to bridge the gap between the field of child protection and the social fields of peer groups. This can be done by theorising and testing a new approach to extra-familial child protection — Contextual Safeguarding. In so doing, the chapter explains a framework through which peer abuse can be both perceived, and responded to, as a child protection issue.

‘Losing track of morality’: understanding online forces and dynamics conducive to child sexual exploitation

This chapter argues that the ideology of cyberlibertarianism, combined with organisational social processes and the impact of power, have contributed to tech corporations acting in ways that facilitate child sexual exploitation (CSE; both directly and indirectly). Relatedly, cyberlibertarianism has contributed to online spaces and processes being understood and approached as freer from social and moral concerns than others. Thus, the chapter specifically explores how the evolution, design, and control of the Internet and digital technology have been conducive to CSE. Four key (interrelated) online routes to increased CSE are highlighted involving online sex offending psychology, the online porn industry, online ‘escort’ agencies, and the interaction of social media and gaming platforms with adolescent developmental proclivities. Practice and policy implications of this ‘big picture’ perspective of online contributors to CSE are then explored.

Using an intersectional lens to examine the child sexual exploitation of black adolescents

This chapter employs intersectionality as a critical lens to interrogate the ways that race, gender, class, and sexuality impact black adolescents' experiences of child sexual exploitation (CSE). In particular, the exploration is anchored in an intersectional analysis to extend understandings of the nuanced ways in which race-constructed otherness is experienced by young black people affected by sexual exploitation. It first briefly sketches the key messages from the literature on CSE and black children. The chapter next provides an overview of the intersectionality theoretical framework. Finally, it uses a case study, from the Serious Case Review (SCR) of child R, a 15-year-old black girl in the looked-after system, as an exemplar. From there, it presents ways that an intersectional lens can offer some analytical tools to gain a deeper insight into the challenges for black youths at risk of abusive and exploitative relationships. The chapter concludes with some discussion of the implications for a child-focused approach.

What’s gender got to do with it? Sexual exploitation of children as patriarchal violence

This chapter sets out that gender is critical to talking and theorising about sexual exploitation in two main ways: in understanding patterns of perpetration and victimisation, and in how policy and practice responds to young people. In the UK and around the globe, victims/survivors of sexual exploitation are disproportionately girls, and those who abuse and exploit them are mostly men and boys. Yet in much policy and public discussion, sexual exploitation is often framed as an issue involving ‘children’, without attention to the asymmetry between experiences of young women and young men. The chapter thus draws on bell hooks to suggest that sexual exploitation can be conceptualised as a form of patriarchal violence, an approach reflecting decades of feminist analysis that links sexual abuse and exploitation to patriarchal power. Throughout the chapter, implications for practice are highlighted and reiterated.

Bringing theory home: thinking about child sexual exploitation

This chapter connects theory to how child sexual exploitation (CSE) interventions can be approached. To explore this connection, the chapter offers some personal reflections that highlight the ways in which theory can provide meaning. It shows how one can explore why we, and/or our service employer connects with theory — we can bring it ‘home’. Theory thus becomes something that is important to talk about, even if its meaning is unclear or uncertain. In fact, the chapter asserts that the more uncertainty there is, the better, as it encourages those working with CSE cases to explore their motivations and how they justify their work.

Moving beyond discourses of agency, gain and blame: reconceptualising young people’s experiences of sexual exploitation

This chapter explores the relationship between victimhood and agency, and the unhelpful binary ways in which it has often been conceptualised within child sexual exploitation (CSE) discourse and practice to date. It observes how adherence to dichotomous conceptualisations of those experiencing CSE, and associated narrow understandings of CSE victimhood, have served to diminish our responses to particular populations and particular manifestations of harm; namely those typified by any degree of observable agency on the part of the child. Here, reframing young people's experiences of CSE through the lens of structuration theory offers a much-needed way to move us beyond the observable simplistic binary conceptualisations of victimhood versus agency. It helps us to better understand and respond to the widely variable and complex dynamics and contexts of CSE. Specifically, reconceptualising young people as ‘reflexive agents’ operating within a ‘structure of constraint’ offers us a means of concurrently recognising the range of biographical and contextual factors at play in any given situation, and allows us to move beyond exclusionary ‘idealised’ victim-based patterns of identification and response.