Introduction

This chapter argues for a conceptual shift in our understanding of child protection. Drawing on some of the key lessons from Munro's (2011) review of child protection, it argues that our understanding of child protection must develop from one focused on protecting younger children from abuse in the home to one incorporating the protection of older children from abuse located and experienced outside the home.

The chapter uses child sexual exploitation (CSE) as an example to illustrate the complexities of extending the child protection framework to embrace the needs of older children, particularly adolescents. It develops Munro's call for a systemic approach to understanding the difficulties faced by those working in child protection and her request for relationship-based thinking to inform the supervision of practitioners, helping them manage the anxieties that emerge when responding to difficult and emotive casework. It argues that future policy and practice to protect children from sexual exploitation should not only be modelled on reviews of recent cases where abusers have been prosecuted. Rather than using these reviews to blame individual practitioners for failing to recognise the exploitation of a child, it calls for a more nuanced understanding of the social context in which the practitioner is functioning. This is particularly relevant for practitioners understanding the social context in which a child's capacity to consent to sexual activity may be abused.

I argue that relationship-based child protection interventions with older children could be enhanced through learning action partnerships (LAPs). Originally developed by staff working with the Oak Foundation developing sustainable interventions to prevent child abuse, LAPs offer a model of engaging with young people as partners, recognising their capacity either to engage or disengage from the support and protection offered by children's services. LAPs provide us with a model for developing safeguarding with adolescents, who, unlike babies or toddlers, have the capacity to exert their own agency through taking safeguarding into their own hands, by ‘going missing’ or by rejecting support through other means.

In summary, the chapter moves through three stages. First, it notes that most discourses about ‘child protection’, including those addressed by the Munro review, have, in the main, overlooked the needs of vulnerable older teenagers who are being abused as they approach adulthood.

Introduction

This chapter looks at the relationship between risk, resilience and sexual exploitation as experienced by young people. First it defines sexual exploitation. It then looks at the different types of risk factors that have been identified to make a young person vulnerable to exploitation. It looks at the risks that young people might face while being involved in a sexually exploitative relationship and the interventions that might support vulnerable young people. It explores these in relation to the young person's resilience: their capacity to manage different forms of risk. It looks at the interplay between risk and resilience by referring to case study work with 55 sexually exploited young women (Pearce, 2002). The chapter then identifies a specific case study to look at resilience factors that contribute to the young person feeling stronger, more capable of recovering from abuse and of preventing it from reoccurring.

Sexual exploitation

Sexual exploitation is the process through which a young person under the age of 18 is enticed or coerced into a sexual relationship against their will. It has been asked: can a young person under the age of 18 choose to sell sex (Chase and Stratham, 2005; Harper and Scott, 2005)? Hidden within this question is the issue of the young person's agency. Are they a victim of sexual exploitation – a victim of abuse exercising no choice in the matter – or are they a young prostitute – someone who is exercising some choice, being capable of deciding to earn money through the sale of sex (Phoenix, 2002; Melrose and Barrett, 2004)?

Local government protocols for safeguarding sexually exploited children and young people ask services to respond first and foremost to the young person as a victim of abuse, employing child protection procedures where appropriate (DH, 2000). Consultation papers are currently looking at enhancing ways of safeguarding children, mentioning the need to address sexual exploitation as one of the key objectives in keeping children safe (DfES, 2004). The government is also addressing law enforcement issues within prostitution and trafficking, looking at some of the related policy and practice interventions that emerge (DH, 2005). Despite these developments, government policy is contradictory. Although the 2003 Sexual Offences Act makes it an offence for someone to entice a young person under the age of 18 into prostitution, the 2006 Prostitution Strategy allows for young people themselves to be arrested for offences relating to prostitution.

Nowhere is the tension between the need to prevent risk and the necessity of learning to manage and take calculated risks more apparent than in the process of growing up from childhood to adulthood. Survival of the individual and of the social group has always relied on ensuring a balance between protecting the very young from danger and allowing the child to experiment and learn to navigate the risks and dangers encountered in daily life. In some circumstances, risk taking is socially approved and rewarded – in business life, in record-breaking sports activities or in action in military service, for instance. Increasingly, however, the concept of ‘risk’ has become associated with harmful or negative events and behaviours, which can be predicted, measured and avoided or minimised through timely, responsible action (Douglas, 1992; Lupton and Tulloch, 2002; McWhirter and South, 2004).

The move towards a ‘culture of caution’, where, for most people most of the time, risks must be prevented, has come to dominate social and health policy. This, it could be argued, is to the detriment of understanding and responding to risk as an essential, unavoidable and sometimes positive element of the human condition (Green et al, 2000). It also undermines the important relationship between risk taking and building resilience. An individual's resilience – the capacity to draw on their own resources to withstand unpredictable events that are a part of everyday life – is developed through taking risks and learning to cope with the unexpected (Gilligan, 1997). However, much of the discourse on risk views risk-taking actions and behaviour as bound up with ‘ignorance’ and ‘irrationality’ and often fails to take into account the voluntary nature of risk taking and the pleasures and benefits that can be derived from ‘risky’ activities. How risk is defined and understood has important implications for the development of policy and intervention to address the dangers that children and young people face as they grow up.

Over time, in health and social welfare (as in other policy domains), we have seen shifts in the perception of risk. The pre-modern notion of risk as an unpredictable ‘act of God’ was replaced with the modern ‘scientific’ view that it was an inevitable aspect of life, which could nevertheless be managed and contained.