Home AffairsWritten evidence from The End Violence Against Women Coalition [LCG 04]

About the End Violence Against Women Coalition

The End Violence Against Women (EVAW) Coalition campaigns for governments at all levels around the UK to take urgent action to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls. We are the largest coalition of its kind in the UK representing over 7 million individuals and organisations. A full list of members is on our website www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk.

Summary

We warmly welcome the Home Affairs Committee’s Inquiry into “Localised child grooming”. All the research we have to date suggests that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators and girls disproportionately the victims so it is essential to take a gendered approach to understanding and responding. This should be addressed in a coordinated way and connected to the Home Office-led Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls strategy which the Committee has previously considered.

We would suggest that the remit of the Inquiry should be broader to consider sexual abuse and exploitation in the round. We note that “grooming” is not a specific form of child sexual abuse, but rather a way in which perpetrators target children and manipulate environments about which there is much expertise (the first paper on “child sex rings” was published in 1979). A broader remit would ensure that the focus remains on the gendered nature of the problem, and avoids the risk of becoming racialised. Further, that the range of routes and processes through which girls and young women become ensnared in exploitative networks and relationships, beyond “grooming”, are also addressed. International human rights obligations require the UK to address all forms of sexual exploitation with equal attention and resources.

With regards to girls in local authority care, there is research showing factors which precipitate their involvement in sexual exploitation and therefore identifiable ways of reducing and preventing this.

We would be pleased to give oral evidence to the Inquiry about these issues.

Submissions to the Inquiry into Localised Child Grooming

1. The End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW) warmly welcomes the Home Affairs Committee’s Inquiry into “Localised Child Grooming”. The issues at stake are ones that our members have considerable expertise in, both from an academic perspective as well as from the experience of frontline service providers.

2. The current evidence base reveals that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of all forms of child sexual abuse and exploitation, and that girls and young women are disproportionately its victims. Whilst some boys and young men are victimised, this is in much lower numbers, and again the perpetrators are also men. We need to understand and attempt to explain these gendered realities if we are ever to hope to address this issue in anything other than a reactive way.

3. We therefore strongly recommend that policy on this issue should be linked into the Home Office-led Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls which is the Coalition Government’s cross-government strategic initiative to end all violence against women and girls (VAWG).1 This should be reflected at local level in terms of joined up and gender-specific delivery. Our blueprint of a VAWG strategy, Realising Rights, Fulfilling Obligations, which led to the Coalition Government’s strategy sets out a strategic framework more fully.2

4. We would suggest that the Inquiry should be broadened out to cover sexual exploitation and abuse. We note that “grooming” is not a specific form of child sexual abuse and would caution against disconnecting the issue from an evidence base spanning three decades and from the overarching and structural issues, including gender. There are established fields on both “child sex rings” and “child sexual exploitation”, which has much to tell us about how perpetrators target children and manipulate environments to their benefit and this has been documented by UK and international research for at least three decades.3 A broader remit would ensure that the focus remains on the gendered nature of the problem, and avoids the risk of becoming racialised. Further, that the range of routes and processes through which girls and young women become ensnared in exploitative networks and relationships, beyond “grooming”, are also addressed.

5. Research consistently shows that peer association, drift and the need to survive financially are contexts in which young women trade sexual activities informally and in the more organised sectors of the sex industry.4 Focusing on the ways perpetrators target children and manipulate environments will result in a partial grasp of what is at issue here. The risk is that hierarchies of harm and deservingness of intervention will be created, prioritising those who have been demonstrably coerced against those who appear to be exercising “choice”.

6. We note that under international human rights instruments to which the UK is signatory (the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, the Palermo Protocol on trafficking and the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse), all forms of sexual exploitation should be addressed with equal attention and resources.

7. With respect to local authority care, one of our expert members, Dr Maddy Coy, worked in a specialist children’s home for sexually exploited young women, the first in England, and subsequently completed her PhD on links between local authority care and sexual exploitation. This research identified a number of issues which precipitate young women’s involvement in sexual exploitation: multiple placement moves which disrupt young women’s sense of self and thus make them vulnerable to predatory adults who use affection to win their trust; professionals who all too often respond only to concerns about sexual behaviours which leads to young women perceiving that sex is a source of attention and all they are valued for; aftercare placements and hostels which are frequently located in street soliciting areas, leading young women to form friendships with those in or associated with the sex industry.5

8. We welcome the Coalition Government’s priority in the Strategy on preventing violence before it begins and positive work includes the campaign to prevent teenage relationship abuse (This Is Abuse). However, there is no long-term programme of work to prevent sexual abuse and exploitation of girls and young women, despite extensive data that sexual abuse in childhood is connected to a wealth of negative outcomes and pathways, including re-victimisation as an adult. We are concerned that the Department for Education continues to significantly lag behind other key departments in its response to VAWG. We would want to see prevention of sexual abuse and exploitation embedded across the school curriculum; initial and continuing training of teachers and school staff; evidence-based and long term public awareness campaigns; work with the media to tackle the sexualisation of women and girls; funding for community-based prevention work; and long-term research and evaluation of prevention interventions. We also believe it is essential that work in this area is joined up with work on rape and sexual violence, sexualisation, serious youth violence, prostitution and trafficking, and other forms of violence against women and girls under the remit of the Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy. Our policy report on preventing VAWG, A Different World is Possible, sets out action across different policy areas.6

We would welcome the opportunity to speak to the Inquiry panel in more depth about our knowledge of these issues.

End Violence Against Women Coalition

August 2012