SURVEY - Professionals Young People Out of Home/Care Strategy

Introduction

The Gloucestershire Safeguarding Children Partnership’s Child Exploitation Strategy is changing. A task and finish group has been put in place including members of the GSCP Child Exploitation and Missing subgroup and the National Working Group Exploitation Response Unit (NWG) in order to write the new strategy. The new strategy will be entitled Young people away from home or care. This change reflects the evolving risks of exploitation that children can be exposed to by extra familial perpetrators.

Child exploitation occurs where an individual or group takes advantage of an imbalance of power to coerce, control, manipulate or deceive a child or young person under the age of 18. This can result in them engaging the exploited child into sexual or criminal activity. This new strategy will include the counties response to children who are at risk of such abuse, as well as children who have been abused in this way. Although the definition relates to under 18s the strategy will include the counties provision for all young people up to the age of 25 including care leavers.

Your views are being sought to help shape the new strategy for the county. Please share your views in order to help improve our service provision for all young people who are affected by this issue.