Safeguarding Children: Reflection on a Case of Sexual Exploitation

SAFEGUARDING CHILDREN
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This study is about child’s sexual molestation case history, its reflection on the
child, helping agencies, the prospects of safeguarding that child with respect to
probable risk management, interpersonal roles and vulnerability. This discussion also
includes the legislations to keep children in a safe position in case of sexual abuse. The
focus of the study is to increase awareness about a person’s roles and responsibilities
that they are required to fulfil in order to follow statutory policies.
According to Warr (2014, p.17) the term “child abuse” refers to any form of violence,
mistreatment or neglect applied to a child by an adult and there are four types of abuse:
neglect, physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Sexual exploitation is a form of abuse
that can take place in the areas of work, colleges, and schools and even at home which
may tend the child to face post order trauma, anxiety, depression and many more
mental health issues that can be faced by a person in his/her adulthood. Sexual
exploitation is a serious issue for the child that should be taken seriously in order to
reduced and eliminate the risk of being abused (Pearce,2019,p.154). This study is an
example of thousands of cases like Katie from UK.
In the case of chosen SCR, Katie started facing sexual exploitation from the age of 14.
Katie lived with her mother at first, after the separation of her parents. She was
neglected and was forced to live in a caravan outside the home. Katie started living with
her father after some time. However, her father shared her home with other men and
the environment was not suitable for Katie at all. Slowly she started using foul language
and became a drug addict. Katie had nobody who could take care of her, although both
of her father and mother were alive. She started living in foster care.
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Katie got support from several agencies like Family Support Service and Multi Agency
Safeguarding Hub. These are the two main agencies who worked on assignment to
support family by identifying Katie as a “Child in need”. This shows that social welfare
agencies got involved to rescue Katie who was trying to self-harm.
The roles of agencies for supporting the sexual abuse victim children or likely to be
suffered are to protect them from getting further molestation or neglect. The
organisations try to explore the bad experiences and feelings of the victims. They try to
provide emotional support including rebuilding trust on society. They also provide
counselling that will help the child to overcome the trauma, cope up with the post
incidental symptoms like anxiety, depression, post traumatic order, flashbacks,
nightmares and most importantly to eliminate the tendency of self-harm. With mental
health, the agencies also provide care for physical needs after trauma. They look for
reducing further risk factors for that particular child so that they can be both mentally
and physically stable in adulthood (Henderson & Thompson, 2015, p.631). The initiative
that is taken by agencies in general for reducing cases like Katie is to guide families
who are in need or risk with respect to this aspect.
In Katie’s case school took some steps to ensured that education of the victim is not
affected even after she moved to another school. Not only this Katie’s GP also came
forward about Child Sexual Exploitation and shared some information with “Children’s
Social Care” (Davies et al., 2015). A number of child abuse caring practitioners from
several agencies developed strong relationships with the victim, Katie, which has
helped her to overcome the trauma she was going through. They invested sufficient
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time with Katie and her family in order to provide mental support to them (Sheehan,
2018).
The agencies ensured that all the services that were provided to the victim and her
family should be in a continuation until she gets justice and gets stable. For this reason,
Katie was provided with a taxi to go to school as a part of care and safety. CAFCASS
ensured that Katie had suffered a lot and meets the criteria of Serious Case Review.
The agencies also ensured that she should be getting good nursing by the school nurse
in order to maintain her sexual health check-ups as well as mental health (GDC, 2019).
From the above brief description it is clear there is a huge role of agencies in order to
support the victims of child sexual abuse so that risk management can be maintained,
and support can be provided to organizations that help victims like Katie. There are
some vulnerable factors behind in every sexual abuse case and in the case of child
molestation; the factors are even huge and high in number. The factors of increasing
vulnerability to child sexual abuse and neglect are divided mainly into two parts like;
family factors and child factors (Lane et al., 2016). Katie was in a situation due to the
habit of taking drugs like “sex for drugs”. Many times, she went missing for the same
willingly. These are sufficient cause that helps in explaining vulnerable situation of
teenagers like Katie.
The definitions and credentials of the serious case review of the child’s sexual abuse of
Katie are explained here. The above discussion sketches that the factors of vulnerability
that increases the chance of sexual molestation, the role of risk management to control
the after-effect of sexual molestation as well as the risk of being molested. The role of
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