Comment by flanked-evergl

From the government report:

> Of these contact offences, an estimated 17,100 are ‘flagged’ as child sexual exploitation in police recorded crime data.

> New police data, the Complex Organised Child Abuse Dataset (COCAD), while suffering a number of limitations, has identified around 700 recorded offences of group-based child sexual exploitation in 2023.

> Given the lack of a prevalence survey and how under-reported child sexual exploitation is, the flaws in the data and confusing and inconsistently applied definitions and data sets, it is highly unlikely that this accurately reflects the true scale of child sexual exploitation, or group-based exploitation.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-audit-on...

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Child H (2008) was 11 years old when she came to the attention of the Police. She disclosed that she and another child had been sexually assaulted by adult males. When she was 12, she was found drunk in the back of a car with a suspected CSE perpetrator, who had indecent photos of her on his phone. Risky Business became involved and the Locality Team did an initial assessment and closed the case. Her father provided Risky Business with all the information he had been able to obtain about the details of how and where his daughter had been exploited and abused, and who the perpetrators were. This information was passed on to the authorities. Around this time, there were further concerns about her being a victim of sexual exploitation. She was identified as one of a group of nine children associating with a suspected CSE perpetrator. Her case had not been allocated by children’s social care. The Chair of the Strategy meeting expressed concern about her and considered she needed a child protection case conference. This does not appear to have been held. Three months later, the social care manager recorded on the file that Child H had been assessed as at no risk of sexual exploitation, and the case was closed. Less than a month later, she was found in a derelict house with another child, and a number of adult males. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly (her conviction was later set aside) and none of the males were arrested. Child H was at this point identified as being at high risk of CSE. Risky Business, social care workers and the Police worked to support Child H and her father and she was looked after for a period. She suffered a miscarriage while with foster carers. Her family moved out of the area and Child H returned home. Some of the perpetrators were subsequently convicted.