Introduction

It is nearly 20 years since the UK started ‘doing something’ about child sexual exploitation (CSE). From our vantage point of the early twenty-first century, it seems self-evidently true that CSE is a form of child sexual abuse (CSA) and, as such, statutory social services (and the police) are the best agencies to deal with it. It also seems self-evident that social work professional knowledge and expertise is required in order to assess individual cases, understand the aetiology of CSE and individual's circumstances, devising and managing programmes of intervention that will produce the best possible outcome for the abused child.

If we scratch below these taken-for-granted truths, though, we may see that our contemporary practices rest on what is, in effect, certain ‘unsayable’ things. What is ‘normal’ adolescent behaviour? How is it shaped by wider social structures of race, gender, ability and age-based inequalities? What are the connections between CSE and prostitution? They may be ‘unsayable’ because the assumptions we work with seem in themselves ‘self-evident’ (the difference between ‘normal’ and ‘not normal’). They may be unsayable because of the way that we define and act upon CSE. As CSE is currently constituted, to acknowledge that there might be a connection between CSE and prostitution is seen as implying that the children harmed have somehow, in some way, consented to their harm.. Yet, these ‘discursive erasures’ have not always existed. The connections were once acknowledged, understood and discussed without the sole recourse being to statutory social services and child protection practices and without anyone denying the harm and damage that was done to young people.

This chapter provides a discourse analysis of the emergence of CSE as a social problem in order to uncover the unchallenged modes of thought that dominate our practices and assumptions about what CSE is and how to deal with it. The first section describes discourse analysis and suggests the sort of questions that such an approach raises. The second section describes the discursive field out of which emerged the discourse of CSE as a particular type of social problem.