COVID has of course impacted us all, but children especially so and in many different ways. Based on her presentation at the 2020 Inside Government’s Tackling Child Sexual Exploitation conference, in this Safeguarding Podcast we discuss with Sheila Taylor MBE, CEO of the NWG Network, the impact of COVID on children, children’s services, child sexual exploitation, domestic violence and what the positive outcomes of COVID might be.
There’s a lightly edited transcript for legibility below for those that can’t use podcasts, or for those that simply prefer to read.
Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation’s safeguarding podcast with Neil Fairbrother, exploring the law, culture and technology of safeguarding children online.
Neil Fairbrother
COVID has of course impacted us all, but children especially so and in many different ways. To help guide us through this topic, I’m joined by Sheila Taylor MBE, CEO of the NWG Network. Welcome to the podcast, Sheila.
Sheila Taylor MBE
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Neil Fairbrother
Can you give us a brief resumé please Sheila of your background so that our listeners from around the world understand it a little bit more about you.
Sheila Taylor MBE
Oh, I will try. I don’t have a professional background in that I’m qualified in being a social worker or a police officer or anything else. In fact, previously I was a clown, which today I like to say, I no longer spin plates, I just juggle! It was through that work and through voluntary work that I came across a parent whose child was sexually exploited. I also worked for the Prince’s Trust at that time. So as a volunteer and helping set up projects, so we set up a project in Derby that supported young people being abused through exploitation. That was back in 1998. So a long journey, really.
In those days we called children that were exploited “children in prostitution”, which was just horrendous and the legislation was not fit for purpose. So I was part of a small team that helped to develop the Sexual Offenses Act, which was launched in 2003 and being frontline in a practice that supported children directly meant that actually, I was never very interested in people’s thresholds or pieces of paper or structures or procedures. I was more interested in the child and more interested in throwing away the piece of paper that they were trying to make the child fit into, by keeping the child at the centre of all the responses.
So that was Safe and Sound Derby. We worked with a lot of young people, about 200 young people per year at that stage [with] a variety of forms of exploitation, boys and girls. And of course there was a long history of not recognizing boys being equally susceptible to this type of exploitation either. And [this] was pivotal to making Operation Retriever happen in Derby, which was nine men that went to prison for raping 28 girls essentially, for a long period of time.
And following that, I found within the space of about three weeks over 70 police units had contacted me to say, we have a similar issue around exploitation and can you help? Can you come and talk to us about what you did and what it looked like? Suddenly this new direction of travel happened to not working within Derby city confines, to a national remit. The very first one that I worked with was Operation Bulfinch and Operation Span, the Rochdale case, helping them to look at their exploitation within their areas, and consequently, there were police operations that proceeded. Plus many authors as well at the same time.
Neil Fairbrother
And what how did that lead to the NWG Network where you are now CEO?
Sheila Taylor MBE
[All of] that meant that I couldn’t engage with all of those people nationally, because my funding was for the Derby city and so we were in danger of operating outside our charitable remit so I left Safe and Sound Derby.
The NWG Network was an informal group of people that came together who were all basically CEOs or workers within the field of sexual exploitation working together and we constituted it, I think it was 2003, and then we got some funding and eventually I became the CEO of that. And when I took over in 2011, with 256 names on an email with three events per year, today we’re about 14,000 dissemination points across about 300 organizations. We host about 60 learning events a year and in a period of about three years, we supported about 30,000 professionals about upskilling and capacity building so that when they did respond in actual fact, we were benefiting more children.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. So you’re a UK registered charity focused on preventing child sexual exploitation.
Sheila Taylor MBE
That’s correct, yes.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. So let’s go right back to basics then Sheila. What is your definition of child sexual exploitation? Because you do differentiate between that and child sexual abuse, whereas a lot of people might think they are same thing.
Sheila Taylor MBE
Well they are the same and any abuse on children is abuse. I think the definition or the criteria that we’re working to is that we don’t focus on children that have experienced familial abuse on its own. Familial abuse is often in the history of young people that are exploited. But for us, it’s that third party exploitation.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay, and in fact, you do make the point on your website that the majority of children who are victimized in this way are not “looked after” children and in fact, these are the minority being 20% to 25% of victims. So presumably the rest are children that are in “regular” if I may use that phrase, families?
Sheila Taylor MBE
Yes. That was certainly a figure that was banded about a while ago. I can’t remember when that figure was, but that is still the case. I think one of the reasons that people tend to think it was children in care in those early days was that we had more reporting around them. And there were more meetings about that particular child. So there was more of an area, there was more space, to share those concerns, to recognize that children in care were exploited and it gave us an over representation of those figures.
There’s definitely an over-representation. If you said there was a hundred percent of children exploited was 30% and at 30%, there would be an over-representation of children in care. But it definitely is what we would class as, you know, your average families as well. All spectrums as well, those that have some economic poverty or rurally based, or families where there are higher earners, high achievers, everybody can be affected by this.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes. And despite all of those differences, there is a common theme which you highlight, which is that in all cases, there is an imbalance of power and control exerted on young people by the perpetrator.
Sheila Taylor MBE
Yes. I think that is the biggest thing really. It is control and it’s sometimes very subtle. It’s sometimes overt. How would you explain it? It is manipulative, they manipulate as well. Children and young people are not always able to see that. Certainly the younger ones, the nine, 10, 11, 12 year olds, they are not able to know that somebody is manipulating them, that somebody’s controlling them, they’re not able to consent all of those things, but also that desire to drive them in the direction that the offender wants. They just don’t understand it.
Neil Fairbrother
So you spoke yesterday at the In Government’s Tackling Child Sexual Exploitation conference, and you highlighted some work done by Dr. Warren Larkin, who is a Professor at Sunderland University ,which outlined some areas of impact that COVID has had, one of which is the increase of domestic violence. Is that between parents and other adults, or is it domestic violence aimed at children? And if it’s between adults and not the child, then what impact does it have on the child who might be witnessing that?
Sheila Taylor MBE
I think Dr. Warren Larkin was speaking about the history of pandemics and how that our pandemic had already led to a rise in domestic violence and abuse, and that it was a pattern that had been seen in previous epidemics and crisis situations and many countries had seen the rise in household conflict and abuse during this pandemic.
I don’t know what the figures are behind those domestic violence incidents to be able to comment on that, but certainly violence within the home is always difficult for children, whether they’re a victim of it or whether they’re watching it. What does that mean for that child? What does it tell that child, that it’s okay if there’s no response to it? If somebody doesn’t report it in and there’s no consequence to it?
So we do have to be really careful about violence within the home, because it teaches our children violence within the home is acceptable. And the rise in domestic violence during pandemic makes it very difficult for children and young people to disclose to anybody else that they are suffering the witness of it, or the abuse of it within the home, because they’ve not had those safe places to disclose in.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes. One of the other points raised was that young people and children are finding support more difficult to find as everything has moved on line. How can that be addressed?
Sheila Taylor MBE
It has been really difficult I think for practitioners, key workers, who’ve got young people that they’ve been supporting, and we have to be really careful about this online situation because we’re teaching our children to be more careful online and not to talk to strangers and then on the other hand, we’re encouraging them to engage with us online during COVID.
There’s multiple difficulties I think about the digital platform that we’ve got. One of those is that not all young people have got access to a digital world and that digital poverty and what that means for them. So those young people that are able to engage online through WhatsApp or Messenger or whatever it is, whatever platform is set up for them to engage with their key worker, they’re able to find a space to talk to their key workers. And that’s really good. And that gives them a safe space to perhaps talk about…
But if you’re in a violent household, you may not have that space. You may be in the living room at a family computer, you may not have that privacy to be able to tell somebody that this is happening within your four walls, and you can’t get out to tell anybody else. Of course, that’s compounded, if that young person’s got no access to a digital platform or a key worker through the COVID position. So we’ve got multiple issues there.
Neil Fairbrother
I was going to ask you, you mentioned digital and virtual poverty. How can that be overcome? Particularly when schools are now mandated to provide a blended learning environment, they’re expected to deliver offline and online lessons for their pupils. They don’t have any extra budget to do it. So how can that digital and virtual poverty be eliminated so that everyone has a level playing field?
Sheila Taylor MBE
Now they’ll ask a question, doesn’t it? I know there was a move at one point for the government to provide extra tablets or laptops or whatever they were to schools. And then that didn’t materialize in the same numbers that they had hoped to receive, and that they know that they can’t give one to each child that needs one. I don’t know what the answers are because do we know all the children that don’t have access to something and how do we fund that then? Because that’s a bill. And yet we are not able to engage with them to make sure they’re safe. So I don’t know what the answer is. But I think it’s definitely a problem.
Neil Fairbrother
You mentioned that there is a link or an overlap between child sexual exploitation and County lines. Just by way of a reminder, what are County lines?
Sheila Taylor MBE
County lines is young people that are exploited to move drugs around and to facilitate that drug movement and drug industry. And we definitely understood that young men in particular were encouraged to take their daily exercise on a bike and that was the cover really to being able to move drugs around and partake in, well, not partake [but] exploited to continue what was an increased demand for substances.
Neil Fairbrother
What’s the link though between CSE and County lines?
Sheila Taylor MBE
So what we’ve seen over a period of time is that actually there are some young people that are just sexually exploited. There are some young people that are just criminally exploited in that movement of drugs, but there are a whole host of young people that there is a crossover, that they are sexually exploited, as well as criminally exploited. They may be moved around with drugs, but expected to have sex with the people when they get there. And so there is a definite cohort of young people that fit into both categories.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay, now you did mention that children were encouraged to do exercise during lockdown, and that was used as the cover for drug running. What could be done about that? Should police use their stop and search powers if they see children out exercising on their own, moving around on a bicycle?
Sheila Taylor MBE
There are a number of disruption and prevention ideas, and pieces of legislation, civil laws, et cetera, that can be utilized to disrupt and prevent the movement of exploitation, regardless of whether it’s sexual or criminal. One of our police leads, Kay, alongside Bernardo’s, developed an extremely informative disruption and prevention toolkit, which lists all of those things, all of that legislation, civil laws, opportunities to disrupt and prevent both sexual exploitation and County lines. And it’s a huge document. So it would be difficult to go things individually, but there is a whole raft of abilities to stop it. For me, it’s not about what the police can do, because there’s a lot that they can do, but if they don’t know who is involved, then it’s difficult for them to do anything.
So for me, it’s about a community zero tolerance to exploitation of our children in our society. It’s up to everybody to say, I’ve seen this going on and reporting something, saying something, if they’ve seen something to a point where we have developed a whole campaign around saying something. If you see something, how to report, where to report, what you’re looking for, what to recognize. And it’s when we all collectively as a society work towards the zero tolerance, which sounds simple, but we clearly haven’t got zero tolerance to it, otherwise it wouldn’t exist
Neil Fairbrother
Indeed. And one way that reports happen is through self-disclosure, so a child might disclose that something has happened to them and often that might be [to] a teacher. But you said yesterday that teachers need to feel confident in dealing with disclosures, but often it’s all too complicated for them. Why is that? Are our teachers not trained to deal with disclosures? Are they not suitably knowledgeable about online media law, for example, to be able to deal with disclosures?
Sheila Taylor MBE
Well, what does disclosure mean to you? That means a young person walking up to you and saying, “This is happening to me”. Well, that’s easier to manage, but maybe that young person’s disclosure is through behaviour, their image, the way they look, the way they behave, the way they interact, perhaps they become introverted and perhaps they become quite aggressive, quite violent; and they’re disclosures too. They’re just not words.
But also exploitation of children is a very complex arena. It’s a very, very complex set of manipulations. That is very difficult. When you think of being a teacher, you’ve got to be able to manage a whole host of things from eating disorders to mental health issues, to a whole range of things they’re expected to know everything about. And the reality is, it’s taken me years to know the little bit that I know and I’ve still got an awful lot to learn.
So when a teacher is teaching their subject matter and doing a whole raft of other things as well, they can’t be expected to understand all the complexities around child exploitation. Many teachers do a fantastic job and many teachers have embraced their training really well. But an awful lot of teachers feel a lack of confidence in making the right gestures when a child discloses, making the right decisions, knowing where to go to for help, they can feel quite isolated. And I think that’s where we need to support them. Everybody needs to support them because they’re a frontline service.
Going back after COVID, Dr. Warren Larkin talked about the mental health issues on young people as an impact of being locked down for such a long period of time. And of course, we’ve had a certain amount of freedom, we’re going back into a lockdown situation. Young people are going to school, but they’re immediately being sent home again for isolation for a period of time and that engagement with school is a little bit chaotic and it’s not settled and it’s not likely to be for a period of time. How do you develop those relationships with those children? Especially as September came and a lot of young people moved, everybody moved up a year, you might have new teachers to form relationships with you. You might’ve moved schools. There’s a whole host of things that might’ve happened to you that disrupts some sort of relationship that you might’ve had previously with a teacher. I think teachers have got a very difficult job in front of them and that actually mental health has to come to some degree before the education.
Neil Fairbrother
One of the issues that you raised was that pupil’s academic achievements are at risk of not being realized with the postponement of examinations, their GCSEs and the A-levels and so on. And you mentioned that this may well have a detrimental effect on children’s self-esteem. And you also mentioned Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is an interesting model in this respect, because of course, safety and security are the foundations on which everything else rests. So “self-actualization”, achieving one’s full potential, and for the pupils that could be expressed by success in examinations. So how can you ensure the security and safety needs of children, particularly in the online space, so that they can in fact develop themselves as described by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?
Sheila Taylor MBE
I’m not sure how you can do it online. I mean, when you’re in a school setting or a family setting or whatever, then those basic needs of food, clothing, warmth, affection, esteem, all of those things are easier to implement. A number of years ago I went to a school down South and they have Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs upon the wall and instead of having what the need was, they’d redone the wording. So the bottom level was clothing, food, warmth, accommodation, so that was the foundation, that was the bottom end of the triangle. And then they moved up to the points at the top of that triangle, of course, is the children in need of child protection and children in need and services, et cetera. So I don’t know how you do it online. It’s a much more difficult position.
For example, if you thinking about the coercion and the control, you may be seeing it in a young person. Right now, Neil, you’re watching me online, but you have no idea whether there’s somebody just off screen is manipulating what I say and how I behave with you. And certainly a piece of work that was done by Dr. Paul Kirkley on our behalf, which was exploring grassroots health workers. He spoke with a sexual health nurse and one of the things that she had come across when dealing with children that were exploited was that the people who were exploiting them, so this gives you a level of control and manipulation that they empower, was that that young person was told to make a call to that controlling adult before she went into the sexual health clinic and to leave her phone on and the call running.
Now, what more effective way is there of making sure that child does not say anything or do anything wrong or answers in a way that doesn’t create alarm bells with that sexual health nurse?
Neil Fairbrother
One of the impacts of the COVID lockdown, in fact COVID in general and lockdown in particular, is that everyone is now working from home, which includes child safety practitioners, welfare offices, and so on. What impact has that had on their productivity and their methods of working?
Sheila Taylor MBE
This is an area that really does concern me. I think productivity has gone up massively. Over the period of lockdown we’ve been holding shared learning events, which have had a hundred plus people on each one and they’ve been a wide range of subject matters. I think one of the things that we’ve had fed back all the time is that they’ve got more time for young people because they could fit more young people into a day because you can’t stay on Zoom or Teams or whatever that platform is for as long as you do when you’re going through a physical visit, and going for a physical visit involves you traveling to the meeting, holding the meeting, taking the young person out, maybe traveling back to the office. Whereas the virtual world lines you to go from one young person to another, and you could probably fit many more in a day than you could if you were in a car and going around and that’s fantastic. And some of the digital engagement has been very, very creative and we’ve been really, really impressed with it.
The other side of that coin is that the key workers have reported back. So coordinators and people who hold those multi-agency strategy meetings have reported back saying that they’ve had greater attendance because people are working from home. Each meeting they’ve had all the agencies represented and they’ve had a shorter, more focused meetings, that’s been more action orientated, and that they’ve got more strategic meetings into the day because they’re shorter, they’re punchier. And that is really good.
However, the thing for me is that when you’re in an office and you have a really difficult case, it may be on the telephone. It may be that you’ve met them personally. It may be that they’ve come into the office. It could be any range of things. You put the phone down, you come out of the meeting or whatever, and you go “Phew! Do you know?”. And you talk to your colleagues, you have a conversation, they might make you a cup of tea. They might say, “Oh, let’s have a biscuit, that’s a bad one.”
I went round my office on a regular basis on difficult days and put a little pot of chocolate buttons on everybody’s desk and it’s just about creating that time and that safe space for key workers to come together. And what I find now is that I will pick up a call, I have brought that abuse into my home, not into an office arrangement. I brought it into my home. I’ve discussed it in my home. I have the luxury of an office where I can shut the door, but some people have got this in their living rooms, in their kitchens. They’ve got young children running around. They don’t have that space to be able to process some of that. And they do not have their colleagues easily accessible to go “Phew! That was a bad one.” “Oh, what do you think of this?” “Do you think I’ve said the right thing, do you think I’ve done the right thing? Do you think I’ve missed anything?”
You’re sat at home on your own with it. And I’m really worried about that impact on key workers because the very last thing we need is children and young people to form a trusted relationship with their key worker and [then] we experience a whole host of burnout in industries, in agencies, where there is already a lack of resource and lots and lots of overdemand.
Neil Fairbrother
And it must be quite difficult to ensure confidentiality because those conversations in a living room can be overheard by partners of care workers?
Sheila Taylor MBE
They could be, there could be. You know what? So many care workers are so careful and, you know, many, many that I’ve spoken to have all got ear phones and everything else, and they’ve done it like that. But it’s, I think for me, it’s more about managing it in your own home. My journey home from my office, I might shout at somebody and really be frustrated on my way home to a response. But, you know, by the time I’ve got halfway home, I’ve got rid of it. I’ve processed it. I’ve put it in a place and I’m now on to what are we going to have for tea when we get in. Right now, I’m in my office with it and the minute I open the door, my son says, “What are we having for tea?” And there’s no room within a family environment to be able to have a space to process in the same way.
And I’m worried for frontline practitioners and burnout, because I think they have been overloaded. I think there has been an increase in demand and of course a lack a resource. What we’re seeing is some agencies having to make redundancies, some sectors having to make redundancies because there’s just not the funding around at the moment. It’s all redirected. And I think going forward, it could be an issue because the redirection of funding towards homelessness, food banks, unemployment, mental health has got to be a priority, but where does sexual exploitation, criminal exploitation, embed with all of that? Because it’s all part and parcel of the same thing.
Neil Fairbrother
You mentioned food banks just now and you said yesterday that food banks can act as almost a centre for child sexual exploitation. In what way?
Sheila Taylor MBE
I don’t think it’s limited to child sexual exploitation. There’s been a couple of comments and for me it’s very early understanding. So with not a lot of depth to it at the moment, but there have been initial reports of the exploitation of young people that have been accessing food lines. That came from a County lines kind of source really. So I’m not ever so sure that that would necessarily be just in child sexual exploitation. I think it’s exploitation of children generally.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now you mentioned something yesterday, which some people might think is quite controversial, and that was the indirect victims of online CSE. So for example, a husband might be arrested for downloading images, and this could come as a complete shock to their partner. Where does this take us? The indirect victims are in fact the partners and the children and the wider family?
Sheila Taylor MBE
Yes. It is really difficult. In the work that we’ve done around in direct victims so far, it has been the work with mums. I’m not saying that it is solely the mums that experience, I’m sure that there are some men out there that have had an equal experience, but I’ve not come across them as yet. And this is early work for us. But one of the things that I’m particularly concerned about is a rise, and I feel [it] will be a significant rise, is that in most cases or in many cases that mum did not know that her husband was engaged in downloading indecent images and had no knowledge. Therefore, the day that there was a knock on the door, it’s the start of a completely different life. The minute you open that door, life changes.
And if you didn’t know that this was what your husband was doing, or your partner was doing, your spouse, your wife, whoever it is, then what you’ve got is the start of a vulnerable pathway. So for example, if that knock on the door is to arrest your husband, let’s use a husband as an example, if that knock on the door is to arrest your husband, then there is an adverse childhood experience there. The sudden loss of a significant individual that you’re not prepared for. Similar to a bereavement or a divorce or something like that.
Then you’ve got the impact that that might have. So if that person was a teacher or their daily job was with young people, then they’re likely to lose their jobs. So that might be a loss of a significant income stream. So you’ve got that economic abuse that happens, then that could mean you lose your family home. It could mean that you’re not able to do the things that you’ve always been able to do. So therefore, we’ve got another adverse childhood experience.
If society hears about it and your local community hears about it, then you could be subject to all sorts of unpleasantness around that as a family of somebody who is an offender, so they have another adverse childhood experience. You may have to move the area where all your family and friends are because of that social impact on you, there you have another childhood adverse experience.
And what we do know is that according to research, three adverse childhood experiences makes a child particularly vulnerable. And that child being vulnerable then means they’re an easy target for people who want to take advantage of them. Therefore, if we’re not really careful, then our indirect victims of sexual offending become victims of something else later in life because of all of their experiences.
Neil Fairbrother
So post COVID then what can we look forward to? If anything?
Sheila Taylor MBE
What COVID has done has pushed us into engaging more effectively using the digital platforms and certainly around young people, an awful lot of young people have enjoyed meeting key workers. Some have felt better meeting key workers digitally, virtually, than they have physically. And I think going forward, we’ve got to ask young people what their approach is. Where they fit with this.
Because what we can’t do is assume that online is better for them because they’ve engaged better because it might devalue our engagement with them. They may see themselves as if you like the poor relation in it, that somebody else is more important and gets a face-to-face meeting where I get a digital meeting. So we’ve got to be careful that we ask people what they want their virtual platform to look like if at all, or whether they just prefer to meet directly.
I think it will free professionals time up a little bit if we can move some of the strategic meetings to a virtual platform, greater engagement from greater agencies, shorter, punchier, more focused outcomes from strategic meetings. And therefore that might be really advantageous in helping people to manage what I think will be an increase in demand for services.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay, Sheila, I think we’re going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for your insights. It was fascinating to listen to you yesterday and thanks for going over it again, perhaps in a little bit more detail today. I really appreciate that and good luck with everything that you do.
Sheila Taylor MBE
Thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed talking to you and do direct people to the website. Should they need any support.
Neil Fairbrother
What is the website?
Sheila Taylor MBE
www.NWGnetwork.org or www.stopcse.org, both offer materials, campaigns, resources to help you tackle the issue of child exploitation, either criminal or sexual.