ABSTRACT
A more positive and safer approach to child protection in the community is to reframe this within a Keeping Children Safe model and to link child abuse with other forms of child safety, which are more readily accepted. The First Stop concept began to take shape in 1993, following a series of discussions between the manager at St Gabriel’s Family Centre, the head of the local Child Protection Unit and a Local Authority community work manager, about the prevalence of child sexual abuse. This chapter looks at the process and development of an innovative project which was set up to address child sexual abuse prevention in a community context. It explores the theory and thinking behind the project and the reality of putting this into practice on a housing estate in a South Coast city.
