Working with families

In most cases, parents and carers are not to blame for child criminal exploitation.

Parenting adolescents is challenging. Parents have reduced influence and little control over what happens in the wider community. Exploiters capitalise on this.

Exploiters use normal teenage development to obscure exploitation. They use the tendency to blame parents to deter help-seeking. They threaten parents with violence to their children, or themselves, and can coach their child to make false child protection allegations about them.

Working with parents

Under complex safeguarding, parents are part of the solution. Practitioners should adopt strengths-based, solution-focused ways of working to engage parents in a safeguarding contract. The contract should be underpinned by Transitional Safeguarding and include:

• roles and responsibilities for parents and practitioners
• agreed upon actions
• shared strategies regarding how to address each action
• accountability arrangements for both parents and practitioners.

Parents and professionals should work together to undertake a dynamic process of risk assessment and management. This may provide:

• real-time intelligence that can be used for safeguarding the young person
• information about hotpots in the local community
• exact times of the day or night when risk may escalate for young people
• individuals associated with the criminal exploitation of young people.

Professionals must support parents to maintain a connection with their child.

Rather than imposing strict controls, parental efforts should be focused on maintaining communication and reinforcing their love and commitment. This counteracts exploiter attempts at controlling the young person and isolating them from their family and other protective factors.