From the BBC:
Teachers, social workers and the police are missing the warning signs of children being targeted for sexual exploitation, a charity has said. Barnardo's said children who were being groomed often appeared with unexplained gifts or started engaging in risky behaviour...
Barnardo's is currently working with more than 600 exploited children, is calling for professionals to be specially trained in spotting the tell-tale signs and knowing how to respond to them.
From Barnardo's press release:
The earlier that sexual exploitation, or likelihood of it, can be identified, the more opportunities there are to prevent or minimise the harm suffered by vulnerable children.
Barnardo’s is calling for:
- specialist training for professionals working with children in England - to help to them recognise and respond directly to the early signs of child sexual exploitation
- better co-ordination and information sharing between social services, health, education, specialist services and the police – to ensure the dots are joined in protecting those children at risk.
Barnardo’s provides education and training on a local level via Prevention Education Program (PEP) sessions for both young people in schools, pupil referral and residential units, and for social workers, youth workers and teachers across the UK. A four year partnership scheme between London Councils and Barnardo’s is currently being rolled out to ensure that children and their teachers in secondary schools are made aware of the dangers of exploitative relationships. However, this type of provision is not yet universal.
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5 comments:
Barnardo's is currently working with more than 600 exploited children...
Yeah, exploited by Barnardo's.
RR, you got it in one!
Does the name Liz McLean ring any bells with these people? Liz for those of you that have never heard of her was the social worker who had kids spirited away from their families in pre-dawn raids in both Rochdale and Orkney over what can only be described as her obsession with ritual satanic abuse.
This fucking dingbat went on one of these courses of American new fangled ideas whereby a child pees the bed or is susceptible to a regular ear infection is symptomatic of being ritually butt fucked on a regular basis, and no matter how much the child says it doesn't, it's because the experience is so traumatic the child buries it away in its sub-conscious only to manifest itself in said bed wetting or ear infection.
Eventually calmer heads and the subsequent inquiry by Lord Clyde led to McLean being sacked for the incompetent dingbat she is and thankfully was never allowed near kids again.
Yes there are kids who are abused, but witch hunts by the likes of McLean and she isn't on her own with her dingbat ideas need to be well and truly nipped in the bud.
"Vulnerable children are going unnoticed by professionals – as they fail to identify the tell-tale signs of those being groomed for child sexual exploitation."
That is not true. The social services, teachers and youth workers generally are so hyper-sensitive to this possibility that the courts are clogged up with false positives.
It is true that a number of cases, when the alarm is sounded, are botched - baby P's sister being an example - but compared to the numbers of families in contact with the social services, this is a defensibly small proportion of the case load.
Yes, the social services miss some and they deserve criticism when they do, but it merely encourages unhelpful hysteria for Barnardo's to rush round claiming there are bogeymen under every bed and behind each door.
What Barnardo's need to do is spend some more money on "fundraisers" and to also "network more effectively" by attending events such as the one described in this piece :-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/05/government-urges-charity-giving
wherein one finds that (1) Hurd told the opening day of the London convention, which is supported by the Guardian ... that if charities could survive the short-term effects of spending cuts, they would flourish in the longer term as the government's big-society vision began to become reality. But he admitted that ministers faced a challenge in explaining the vision more clearly. When he asked his audience of several hundred fundraisers if they understood what the big society meant, only a handful indicated that they did" and (2) "The voluntary sector's income from local authority and central government grants and contracts soared from £8bn in 2000 to almost £13bn in 2007. Assuming that trend continued until recently, the sector will now be receiving more money from the state than from individual donations. Some charities are dependent on the state for the great majority of their income: in the employment and training sector, the average level of dependency among charities is 70%".
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