Child sexual exploitation is no longer a ‘hidden issue’. As I have noted throughout this book, it is a problem now prominent in public awareness. At the time of writing, high profile criminal trials relating to charges of organised child sexual exploitation in Rochdale, Derby, Oxford and most recently Rotherham have been the focus of significant national media attention, prompting widespread political and public debate, in particular around the ‘grooming’ of children and young people by gangs of male, predatory adults. A two-year national inquiry instigated by the Children's Commissioner for England reported in late 2013 on the nature and extent of Child Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups, with the inquiry's interim report opening with this grim assessment: ‘[t]he reality is that each year thousands of children in England are raped and abused from as young as 11 years by people seeking to humiliate, violate and control them and the impact on their lives is often devastating’ (Berelowitz et al, 2012: 5). Alongside this attention, investigations into historical cases of child sexual abuse by prominent figures such as Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris have seen the terms ‘child sexual exploitation’ and ‘child sexual abuse’ used interchangeably in media reporting and discussion. In addition, concerns over young people's sexual behaviours and relationships – the uses and abuses of ‘sexting’ and sexual violence – while not often referred to as sexual exploitation, are brought into debates about CSE over concerns about the absence of (and the desire to promote) ‘healthy relationships’ among young people.

So what is CSE? Rape? Sexual abuse? Grooming? All those things? As I considered in Chapter One, there is no agreed policy definition of CSE. In the four UK nations, there are, to date, four separate definitions of the problem. Extending out more widely from the UK, there is no globally recognised definition or understanding of sexual exploitation, with references to child prostitution, or the commercial sexual exploitation of children being far more common.