Its National Exploitation Day – Thursday 18th March.
Barnardo’s want all of their service partners to join them to raise awareness about exploitation tomorrow.
Awareness raising is key to help identify victims and abusers. It also ensures recovery and disruption is at the heart of our responses.
Exploitation is when an abuser takes advantage of a child for their own personal gain. This can take many forms, including sexual exploitation or forcing the child to commit crime. When it comes to exploitation, there is no ‘perfect victim’, any child can be exploited.
They know children do not consent to their abuse, as they do not have choice. They also know, the many ways in which abusers will groom, coerce, threaten, force and abuse. The only way to tackle exploitation is through working together, and jointly intervene to protect children from being abused.
To start the conversation and support them to raise awareness about exploitation, they would like you to join them by posting a personal pledge on your hand using social media #CEADAY21 and #HELPINGHANDS #SAYSOMETHING. When you post the hand pledge, it will represent a personal commitment, what you will do to support and protect an exploited child.
Useful Websites in relation to Child Exploitation:-
- Child sexual exploitation (CSE) | Barnardo’s
- Edge North East Ltd
- County Lines & Child Exploitation | The Children’s Society
- Home – Fearless
- What We Do – www.bespaceaware.co.uk
- Parents Against Child Exploitation (Pace) UK
- Who are we (outofthe-shadows.co.uk)
- Contextual Safeguarding Network – The Contextual Safeguarding programme, and the team who deliver it, are part of the International Centre: Researching child sexual exploitation, violence and trafficking (IC) at the University of Bedfordshire
- Child sexual exploitation | NSPCC
- Criminal exploitation and gangs | NSPCC
- Child Sexual Exploitation | Crimestoppers (crimestoppers-uk.org)
- County lines | Crimestoppers (crimestoppers-uk.org)