This is a report, Out of Mind, Out of Sight: Breaking Down the Barriers to Understanding Child Sexual Exploitation , published in June 2011 by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP). A rapid thematic assessment, it drew on intelligence from 46 police forces, 22 local authorities and safeguarding boards, and 12 voluntar...

IICSA was a statutory inquiry for England and Wales, established in 2015 under the Inquiries Act 2005. Its independence meant that the Inquiry was not part of any government department. The Inquiry's remit was wide-ranging, but as a statutory inquiry it had the unique authority to compel witnesses and request any material necessary to inv...

The government has announced that it is establishing a statutory public inquiry into grooming gangs . The inquiry begins work on 13 April 2026. Why have there been calls for an inquiry? By the early 2010s, multiple child sexual abuse scandals had prompted public concern about the state response to organised and systematic child sexual abu...

"Many of the 100,000 children who run away from home in Britain every year end up on the streets simply because hostels do not take teenagers under 16 and there is nowhere else for them to go, according to a new report. A seven-month investigation by the Children’s Society provides the first in-depth picture of life as an underage runaway...

Excerpt: "The children’s charity Barnardo’s is claiming men who buy and sell children for sex are escaping without punishment because the law is out of date. As the BBC’s Social Affairs correspondent Alison Holt reports, a significant number of children are working as prostitutes but the adults who exploit them face relatively minor charg...

This is a Times article, published 19 October 2018 by chief investigative reporter Andrew Norfolk, reporting on a Manchester case in which the Court of Protection had permitted a 23-year-old autistic woman to have sex with at least six men at her home, and in public, during a court-approved trial period between June and August that year, ...

This is a Times article, published 11 November 2020 by Andrew Norfolk, reporting on findings by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) into South Yorkshire Police's handling of Arshid Hussain, a Rotherham grooming-gang offender jailed for 35 years in 2016 for 23 offences against nine girls. The watchdog upheld a complaint by one...

This is a Times article, published 29 May 2021 by Andrew Norfolk, reporting an interview with Nazir Afzal — the former chief crown prosecutor who overturned a Crown Prosecution Service decision not to charge and secured the 2012 conviction of nine Rochdale and Oldham men for offences against five girls — in which Afzal condemned a "lack o...

"Child prostitutes should be treated as victims rather than criminals, new Home Office guidelines have recommended. This shows that it was routine for sexually exploited children to be subject to criminalisation, instead of rehabilitation. Article mentions police cautions for children. ‘Cautions’ for ‘soliciting’ and ‘loitering’ were usua...

"Bradford still leads the country in the care of children drawn into prostitution, a national conference was hearing today. The childcare charity Barnardo’s has organised the conference, From Awareness to Action, Children Abused Through Prostitution, at the Barbican in London."