ABSTRACT

This extract from Barnardos’ Chief Executive highlights the need for long-term interventions from trained staff working within a supportive environment to meet the many needs presented by young people who use their services. All too often poorly supported residential care workers, teachers, youth workers and volunteers are faced with very complex cases of sexually exploited young people, and have little, if no, access to training to help them to understand the issues involved. Services often rely on temporary staff employed on short-term contracts. These staff can be responsible for generating their own income on a year-by-year basis. This is not an acceptable foundation for a service that is trying to establish

and maintain therapeutic relationships with young people who have experienced a range of placement and relationship breakdowns. They might have a number of physical, sexual, mental and emotional health problems; repeatedly go missing; and feel disassociated from school and peers. In light of all of the work undertaken by the Department of Children Schools and Families (DCSF) and other central government departments in securing a constructive policy framework for sexual exploitation, local provision from both voluntary and statutory sectors must be resourced to provide an appropriate service to sexually exploited children and young people. In this chapter I want to focus on Narey’s call for recognition of the pro-

blems carried by individual young people and for the need for trained and supported staff (Narey 2006). I will look at some of the lessons that can be leant from therapeutic interventions with young people, addressing the importance of

and

In earlier chapters I have argued that service responses which focus only on the individual sexually exploited young person and their family run the risk of isolating the individual young person as the problem. Rather than their social and environmental circumstances being considered, the young person’s and their family’s behaviour, their personal histories and capacities to manage difficulty become the centre of attention. While the focus is on the young person and their family, the poverty, the social exclusion and disadvantage they experience can be ignored. The damaging and detrimental impact of the environment is not addressed, and the practitioner is left on their own, held responsible for improving the young person’s behaviour. Instead of the young person and their family being understood as a part of the economic and environmental context that they inhabit, the practitioner is set the unfair challenge of changing the individual without redress to, what is often seen to be, the genesis of the problem. What I do want to highlight here is that although I am looking at some

of the lessons that can be learnt from good, supported therapeutic interventions, I am not advocating that these will be useful if seen in isolation from other forms of support. They are one important part of a range of interventions that need to take place at the individual, family/care group and community levels.