The report was written to identify how agencies worked together from 2007 until 2012 to safeguard young people who were at risk of sexual exploitation.
It seems apparent that the social services did not follow procedures when dealing with these girls who were at risk of sexual exploitation. Multi agency working was a major fault in this case as reports was made to police on several different occasions about sexual exploitation within the same area the girls was mainly aged between () and Asian social services did not make a common link between the girls and should have been able to identify that this could have been a major issue that had arisen as there was a number of girls within the same area encountering the same difficulties. In the report it is highlighted that the social services dealt with the cases as individual cases rather than looking at the bigger picture. Poor multi agency work was identified and multi agency child sexual exploitation protocols were put in place but it was not monitored so therefore it was impossible to identify whether this made a positive difference or not.
Although some changes was put in place to improve interagency working such as training and awareness being provided for different agencies, but there was still inconsistency in the identification of sexual abuse across the teams. Problems were still there such as lack of communication between the social services and the police and also behaviours from young girls was seen as problematic rather than signs of sexual abuse as the right assessment tools was not put in place to identify the difference in behaviours which could have highlighted this kind of abuse.
Safeguarding young people was another major problem within the team there was clearly unable to safeguard these young people who were going through this trauma. They were also unable to stop any other young people encountering this problem by not picking up on the larger scale of the problem.
It had been identified that children who were at risk of sexual exploitation were given support by a number of different agencies, but children who came in contact with the social services no further action was often taken, Therefore enabling these girls to be given the support they needed.
A major issue which was highlighted was the way multi agency work was conducted. Police were alerted by one of the victims Suzie, of the abuse she received and they proceeded by alerting the social services of this. The social services took no action in regards to the referral they received. Suzie’s became pregnant in her teens and her behaviour began to become an issue and she started to self harm and would go missing on a number of occasions. The social services were concerned with Suzie’s ability to be a parent and felt that her behaviour posed risk to her ability to care for her daughter. The social services in my opinion were more concerned with the welfare of Suzie’s child rather than Suzie and her child as a pair. The parenting that Suzie would have been able to provide would have been based on her well being as an individual so there should have been something put in place to help Suzie individually by dealing with the issues that she encountered which in the long run would have able her to be a good parent to her child.
It was stated that practitioners failed Suzie and that social services over estimated the extent to which Suzie could have consented to sexual relations with anybody. In my opinion it was seen that Suzie was somewhat promiscuous and consented to sexual relations rather than her being forced into it. This made it hard for the referrals that were made about to Suzie to develop effectively because of the difference in opinion between the agencies. But no agency took the inicitive to