Make Safeguarding Children from Sexual Exploitation a Performance Target for Police and Local Safeguarding Children Boards

Girls and boys in the UK are targeted and groomed for sexual exploitation by individual and networks of pimps and traffickers. Once groomed they are given drugs, raped, prostituted, battered and subjected to horrific violence and abuse. The process of sexual exploitation involves many different elements of crime which comes to the attention of agencies under different headings, such as children who are missing from home, truanting school, using drugs, prostituted, abducted, raped or murdered.

Of the thousands of children targeted for sexual exploitation, at least 90% go missing as a result of being groomed and are moved from their homes to other towns and cities to be sexually exploited. These children suffer the same traumas as the victims of international trafficking, but few perpetrators are charged, for example, under the trafficking offences, fewer than 1\% of the perpetrators are prosecuted. Lack of recognition of this complex hidden process as one crime, prevents understanding the true scale of the problem across the UK.

We welcome the government?'s new policies and strategic reviews, but children are still being abused by pimps and traffickers. A way of tackling this problem would be to have specific statutory targets for the police and local safeguarding children boards to ensure the implementation of guidance on safeguarding sexually exploited children.

We call upon the UK Government to take necessary action, both nationally and in each local authority, to ensure:

the practical IMPLEMENTATION of relevant guidance and legislation

its MONITORING

publicly available REPORTS on progress
We urge everyone who believes in the need to protect our children, our country?'s future to sign up to this Petition. It?'s never too late to make a difference.