Formerly known as STAGE, the ASE Partnership supported by the National Lottery Community Fund, brings together charities Changing Lives, A Way Out, The Angelou Centre, Basis Yorkshire, Together Women, GROW, WomenCentre, and Ashiana to provide trauma-informed support for people who have been groomed for sexual exploitation across the UK from the age of 16 and over.
To mark child exploitation awareness day, Jess Creaby-Attwood our ASE Partnership Policy Officer sat down with Young People’s Service Manager at Basis Rebekah Vickers-Patel to discuss the realities of child exploitation and the age of transition.
Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your involvement in the Adult Sexual Exploitation Partnership?
I’m the service delivery manager at Basis for our Young People’s Service, which also includes our adult sexual exploitation work. I’ve been at Basis for nearly six years and the whole of that time I’ve been involved with the Adult Sexual Exploitation Partnership. I started as a project worker, then moved into a management and oversight role, and now I also do policy work around transitions.
Today we recognise national child exploitation awareness day, which aims to highlight the issues surrounding child exploitation. Although we are the Adult Sexual Exploitation Partnership, we offer support to young people aged 16 onwards. Why do you think this support in these transitional ages is important for survivors of sexual exploitation?
I think it’s not just important for survivors, but also for people who are at risk of experiencing exploitation as well. A big part of what we do is safety planning to help mitigate those risks and bring in all the right people to help manage that risk. We talk about digging up the bad foundations, and relaying the foundations of positive things, so working with young people can be really transformative – it’s about early intervention.
It’s also about navigation and support through the system, particularly thinking about young people in the age of transition, they might just be a few weeks into legal adulthood, but they’re expected to navigate everything themselves. A lot of what we do is bringing services together, particularly for young people who are over 18 who don’t meet criteria for care and support and adult social care. For a lot of young people there’s nobody taking on that role to bring everyone together. In our transitional safeguarding work, where adult services and children’s services aren’t talking together, we do the legwork to try and bring them together. Following the Teesswide thematic review of SARs, we know what happens when we don’t work together. A group approach needs to be standardised, because the result of not doing that is the loss of life.
Could you tell me a bit about the support offered by this project to meet the unique needs of young people?
I think one of the things we aim to do is be very person-centred. In children’s services you can get quite used to things happening to you and being told what you need to do, so we aim to let the people we’re working with take control of their support. I think we have to recognise as workers working with people who’ve experienced grooming and exploitation, that there’s a really fine line between feeling groomed and exploited as well from a worker, because there is a power imbalance between a worker and someone accessing support. A big part of what we do is demonstrate what a healthy adult relationship looks like.
With sexual exploitation there’s also a crossover with other forms of exploitation, like criminal exploitation and cuckooing. So, we do a lot of partnership working to make sure the right people are there at the right time.
What do you think are the next steps to better support survivors of sexual exploitation?
Firstly, it’s about a better understanding of sexual exploitation and child exploitation. Sexual exploitation and sexual trauma is not visible, but it’s still violence, and when we’re not recognising it in childhood, we will probably end up seeing it continuing into adulthood. So, we need to have a standardised understanding of exploitation and the severity of it. It’s sexual violence, it’s abuse, it’s coercive control, and for some people we’ve worked with it’s torture. We need a standardised understanding across services. We can’t just have specialists because then that knowledge and understanding is really narrow, and only picks up the highest level of harm, as opposed to consistent early intervention, which is really the key.
We also need to recognise our own unconscious bias around adolescence and decision-making in teenagers. As a developmental stage, that is a time where you will take risks, but this can’t lead to victim blaming of young people.
For more information about how we define sexual exploitation, please read our definition and guidance document here.
