Child Exploitation Hub

00:08: DCI Jen Castle, Northamptonshire Police: The Child Exploitation Hub is a multi-agency hub where we’re going to have police, we’re going to have health, and also Northamptonshire Children’s Trust which is our social care, and then will be co-located to work together to recognise child sexual exploitation and child criminal exploitation within Northamptonshire.

00:26: Karen Hoer, Volunteer: Knowledge is power and sharing knowledge is a big thing. We’ve learned from that from lots of negative experiences in history that we’ve got to share information so having one hub where people talk, communicate, share information, share knowledge will only be a positive thing.

00:45: Heidi Baron, Northamptonshire Children’s Trust: It’s quite hard to have a robust response when agencies are all sort of working in different buildings, different places. I guess that was one of the, some of the thinking behind bringing together a multi-agency hub.

00:59: Augusta Ryan, OPFCC: The needs of our county have changed dramatically over the last 5 years since I’ve been working within child exploitation. Having us all together, working together is going to be so positive and it will have a positive impact I’m sure.

01:14: DI Andy Blaize, Northamptonshire Police: The hub will be located here at the Criminal Justice Centre and will be made up of approximately 40 professionals from the different partner agencies. The Hub will be represented by a number of police departments: the Missing Person’s Investigation Unit, there will be a CSE team, criminal sexual exploitation team, there will be a CCE team, child criminal exploitation team, and also a disruption team. We also have a criminal analyst who will be able to provide the information so that we know who’s at risk of exploitation but also which people to target our disruption activities on.

01:52: HB: We’ve visited other hubs in other counties and seeing that actually this way of working can have a significant impact on young people.

02:00: JC: There is a multi-agency work going on already and that comes under the Northamptonshire Safeguarding Children’s Partnership. What the hub will do is allow for that work to be really focused on, so we’re all going to be co-located in the same location, working together, sharing information in a much more streamlined fashion, and also have that wraparound so we know that when we are looking after that child actually we are going out and we’re finding the exploiters. So rather than always reacting to calls for help you know where people have already been exploited or they started go missing and we don’t what those episodes are about, we’re trying to get ahead of the curve. We’ll go and intervene at a much earlier point and we will disrupt the activities and we will criminalise the exploiters rather than the children.

02:45: KH: It’s a bit, for me, like a jigsaw. Everyone has sometimes just a small piece of the puzzle and they might think it’s, you know, not important but actually when someone shares something with someone and someone else shares something with someone then it starts to make a picture. We start to really see things as they are.

03:03: AB: We have a number of children in the county vulnerable to child sexual exploitation. They often go missing for periods of time, they’re exploited by older people, adults who use them for sexual purposes. What we certainly have seen in increasing the child criminal exploitation, particularly the model that exploiters use in the county lines, drug dealing with the person that’s behind that criminal enterprise distancing themselves from it and often we don’t bring them to justice like we should. The hub will make a difference to that through the disruption team and the CCE investigation team.

03:49: Becky Thompson, Northamptonshire Police: The ultimate aim of the hub is to ensure that we are doing all we can to safeguard any young person that is vulnerable to being criminally or sexually exploited and to get in there in the early stages and as early as we can to prevent them hitting that high-risk stage of that exploitation. I’ve been working with Northamptonshire Police in the RISE CSE team for 18 months now. So, I look at new referrals into RISE for high-risk child sexual exploitation cases, I liaise with multi-agency team so social care and health around them cases, I will share any young people that come to my attention that I feel there might be emerging concerns for and I help the officers progress their investigations by ways of victim interviews and helping them take statements.

04:34: Stephanie Riley, Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust: I think child exploitation sort of prevention and disruption around that has to be a partnership response. I represent health in a multi-agency team so it’s quite a varied role. Part of that role is to sort of oversee the caseloads to make sure that young people’s health needs are being identified and met through those multi-agency plans and a big part of my role as well is also educating practitioners around what those health needs would be in different forms. Exploitation can have an impact on mental health, physical health so they may be presenting to our GP surgeries, they may be presenting in A&E, sexual health so I liaise with all those different areas to make sure that they’re updated on their training and you know they’re really sort of confident with their safeguarding responses.

05:30: HB: I will be service manager for the Child Exploitation Hub for the Children’s Services part of that hub. We’ll have a team manager in place and six advanced practitioners who will all be social work qualified. The traditional models we’ve got to respond to child abuse through child protection planning, through child in need meetings. It doesn’t often work in the way we’d want it to work for children who are exploited, it needs that full multi-agency response because I think what we can do is work very closely with the police, while they can do some of the disruption, we will be looking at building up those safe trusting relationships with young people.

06:09: AB: The disruption team will play a most essential part; they will be out there executing warrants. It’s a major step forward for the hub that we’re doing this.

06:23: PS Abdul Salique, Northamptonshire Police: Ultimately, we want to safeguard children and we want to prosecute those exploiting children. We want children in our communities to be safe. It’s becoming more common place for children to be found with significant quantities of Class A drugs. The role of my team and I is not to target those children, it’s to target those that we know are exploited those children. We’ve recruited six officers and myself as part of the disruption team. We have a range of different services within the Hub that will feed us intelligence around what’s going on, so we will be able to work better inter-departmentally both within our own organisation and the wider Northants children services.

07:10: AR: My role within the OPFCC is to manage two projects that are police lead projects: one is the Youth Violence Intervention Unit and one is the Missing Person Investigation Unit. What we recognised within our county is our young people that go missing potentially don’t get support until maybe their fourth or fifth missing episode when they start to become sort of medium risk/high risk. The role of an early intervention and ACE officer within the Missing Person’s Investigation Unit is to visit any young person with three missing episodes or less to offer support and intervention and we can work with that young person for 12 weeks in an attempt that they don’t go missing again. If we use intervention workers to do intervention work, it frees up our police officers to do the policing work and actually for them to use their skills with looking at crimes and those sort of high level exploitation, risks with adults that are exploiting our young people, It means that actually the intervention workers who have got specialisms in completing interventions are the ones that are out there working with the young people, supporting that young person and their families.

08:20: JC: So, while we’ve been working towards the launch of the Hub, we’ve been really busy making sure that everyone’s suitably trained and that we’re all on the same page, we have the same understanding and the same knowledge that can take forward to help the young people in Northamptonshire. We’ve had the child exploitation training, we had trauma informed and care home practice training and that’s the specialist volunteer Karen Hoer who’s helped us with that and her input’s really been invaluable and lets us understand the opinions and the voice of the child to really understand their lived experience.

08:50: KH: Predominantly at the moment I am supporting officers to understand how to work with traumatised children, looked after children specifically care leavers and how to help them bridge that gap in working and understanding trauma and how children can present. I think there’s a lot of misconceptions with children in care and children who have left care or care experience children and I think it’s about knowledge and understanding and, for me, it’s about helping officers understand why young people think, feel, behave in the way that they do because of the trauma that they’ve experienced.

09:28: BT: I think the Hub is going to make a massive difference, I think it’s something that is needed within the county. I think we’ve identified the need for that and having looked at some other areas that have got one and the way that’s impacted I think it’s going to have a significant impact on the areas that we’re looking into.

09:43: HB: I’m really excited, I think we’ve got really strong relationships with partners in the police, we’ve got good relationships with education, I think everybody’s really, really excited about this hub.

09:54: KH: Having all of those services in one place together that you can kind of go to and actually run across the one team and ask them without going sometimes the long way around helps us to protect young people quicker.

10:08: AB: Having all these resources in house means that we can deal with today’s safeguarding today. We can respond to a child in custody today. We can put safety plans in today. We can deal and go out and disrupt offenders today.