Prepare.

Prepare ensures that effective systems, processes and cultures are in place across agencies, working in partnership to tackle and reduce the instances of Child Sexual Exploitation.

Child sexual exploitation, county lines and missing analytics

According to the National Crime Agency, a typical County Line scenario is defined by the following components:

A group (not necessarily affiliated as a gang) establishing a network between an urban hub and county location, into which drugs (primarily heroin and crack cocaine) are supplied.
A branded mobile phone line is established in the market, to which orders are placed by introduced customers, with the line commonly (but not exclusively) being controlled by a third party, away from the market.
The group exploits young or vulnerable persons, to achieve the storage and/or supply of drugs, movement of cash proceeds and to secure the use of dwellings (as commonly referred to as ‘cuckooing’).
The group, or individuals exploited by them, regularly travel between the urban hub and the county market, to replenish stock and deliver cash.
The group is inclined to use violence or threats and weapons, including knives, corrosives and firearms.

Thus, the term ‘county lines’ broadly refers to the supply of illegal commodities to which is often facilitated by the exploitation of vulnerable children and adults.

Linking county lines and child sexual exploitation

Chief Constable Simon Bailey, NPCC Lead for Child Protection and Abuse Investigation, and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Duncan Ball, NPCC Lead for Gangs (County Lines), commissioned analysis to develop and enhance the understanding of the link between county lines and vulnerability, specifically in relation to child sexual exploitation and missing persons.

This analysis was conducted by the Regional CSE Analysts, embedded within each Regional Organised Crime Units across England and Wales. To identify possible links between CSAE missing persons and county lines, analysts compared datasets containing individual-level detail of children who have been a victim of, or have been identified as at risk of Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (CSAE), missing persons under the age of eighteen, and children who have been involved in county lines activity over the period of one year.

Being the first of its kind, this analysis provided a unique insight into the link between CSAE, missing persons and county lines activity and provided both tactical and strategic direction. Where links were identified across force boundaries, results were submitted to forces in the form of intelligence reports (5x5x5) to inform further intelligence development and action.
CSAE Prevention Programme
This work has been supported by the CSAE Prevention Programme which has actively raised awareness around the interlink between child criminal exploitation, sexual abuse and exploitation, trafficking and missing aiming to help a wide range of professionals understand how to identify children affected by these issues, ensure that children and young people are appropriately safeguarded, and create greater police opportunity to disrupt the exploitation and abuse.

The CSAE Prevention Programme has promoted awareness and championed improvement in practice across England and Wales by:
- Delivering awareness raising sessions in relation to criminal exploitation, trafficking and the inter link to child sexual abuse and exploitation to statutory and non-statutory services, including care homes, Youth Offending Services and Safeguarding Leads.
- Creating a toolkit for professionals which aims to address the disparities in safeguarding responses for children who are being trafficked for the purpose of criminal exploitation and offering clear recommendations for practice, including guidance around appropriate language to be used when discussing this form of exploitation.
- Presenting at the All Party Parliamentary Group on Young Runaways and Missing Children and Adults- Disrupting exploitation of children along ‘county lines’.
- Contributed to the storyline development Henry Blake’s powerful County Lines film and supported panel discussions at a number of screenings of the film.
- Supported the Local Government Association by presenting at the Safer and Stronger Communities Board and the Children’s Board around criminal exploitation and the use of the NRM, as well as delivering workshops around criminal exploitation at their Independent Annual Conference.
- Discussing criminal exploitation and promoting the use of the NRM with LSCBS, strategic leads, national charities and public bodies such as Ofsted and Youth Justice Board.
- Promoted guidance on improving response for children and young people affected by criminal exploitation at various national conferences, including the London Ambulance Safeguarding Conference on trafficking and the Ending Gang and Youth Violence conference around reframing county lines as internal trafficking.
- Promoting the use of intelligence sharing from statutory and non-statutory organisation to the police to enable better disruption of exploitation and abuse. This work has also included breaking down barriers that prevent professionals from reporting intelligence to the police.
- Including criminal exploitation as part of our CSE/A Prevention National Strategy as a priority theme.

Childlike sex doll guidance

During the project a new phenomenon was uncovered in relation to the importation from abroad of Childlike sex dolls being utilised by perpetrators.

Childlike sex dolls are predominantly female, although there have been reports of male childlike sex dolls being seized. The dolls are anatomically correct and can come in various shapes and sizes. They come with accessories, clothing and wigs. They are usually 3ft or 4ft in length and have childlike heads, and extremities. The dolls are evidently childlike in stature and appearance.

The response to importations of these dolls was mixed, so coordinators collaborated with the NCA to produce ‘Childlike Sex Doll’ guidance to support them in dealing with Childlike Sex Doll importations.
Childlike Sex Doll Guidance (You must be logged into Polka to see this content)

The production of the guidance undoubtedly improved the response, leading to a number of successful convictions, as outlined in media coverage in:

Childlike sex dolls represent a safeguarding risk to children, and the individuals who import childlike sex dolls need to be fully investigated. Any investigation needs to take into account the risk the individuals pose to all children, specifically any children within their family, any children they may come into contact with through their occupation or any perceived risk the individual may pose to the wider community.

For advice and assistance with any cases please contact DI Dawn Hampson or Hazel Stewart.

CSE operations repository

In 2016 a major organisational risk was identified by Forces and ROCUs across England and Wales in relation to accurately recording the volume of CSE operations occurring in each region. Senior officers in charge of areas such as Firearms or Drugs were able to easily identify how many live operations there were in their force areas/regions, however, it was much harder for CSE leads to answer the same question with any degree of confidence.

Template operations repository
As a result, a template for an Operations Repository was created for all forces in England and Wales to complete on a regular basis, so that details of CSE operations could be accurately recorded and monitored by their respective ROCU.

The main benefits for creating and maintaining an Operations Repository are:
- It enables Force and Regional CSE leads to keep track of all ongoing operations;
- It enables Forces and the ROCUs to understand emerging trends, and the different types of CSE and MOs used by offenders which can assist with writing Tactical Assessments, Strategic Assessments and Problem; Profiles
- The repository enables the ROCU and Forces to easily share good practice, advice, tactics and lessons learned from similar operations across the region. This offers Senior Investigating Officers (SIOs) the opportunity to easily identify a point of contact if they are experiencing similar challenges;
- It assists with national collation and data analysis by the NPCC, NCA and Home Office which contributes to the production of national Tactical and Strategic documents and negates the need for additional requests to Forces or ROCUs;
- It provides a method to measure the force and regional investigative response to CSE, and can be used to inform the data requests by HMIC during inspections.
Details of all CSE investigations or crimes are not required on the repository, however there is a four point criteria for inclusion. An operation does not have to meet all four points to be included on the repository, but it must meet at least one. The criteria are as follows:
1. Any CSE investigation that has been given an Op Name or number that is searchable through the police systems and the organisational memory.
2. Any major CSE investigation with an allocated SIO (All investigations will have an OIC who is usually a PC/DC; however only the major incidents will have an SIO, who is usually a DI or DCI).
3. Any CSE investigation that has been MoRiLE scored by ROCU.
4. Any CSE investigation, whether it has been issued an op Name or not, that has been found to be impacting on community tensions and trust & confidence in policing.
Forces are encouraged to nominate a Single Point of Contact (SPOC) within each force who has responsibility for the repository and ensuring its timely completion and return to the ROCU. The Regional CSE Analyst then collates the returns and conducts analysis on the data to identify regional trends and patterns.

Moving forward, the SPOCs will still be expected to maintain ownership of the repositories and send their completed returns to the ROCU. Full details of the repositories can be obtained by contacting the ROCUs.

CSE Social Media Library

One of the biggest threats facing policing today when tackling CSE, is the large scale of cyber-enabled abuse whereby victims are groomed and abused through the use of social media applications (apps) and websites. There are many websites that provide details of some apps that are of concern to parents, however there was no comprehensive list in existence for a policing purpose. As a result, the Social Media Library was created in January 2017.

What does the library consist of?
The Social Media Library is in a spreadsheet format in Microsoft Excel and provides detail of any app or website that has been encountered within a CSE investigation through a crime, non-crime, referral, intelligence, incident or open-source research where communication has occurred between: a victim or person at risk of CSE; and an offender. It is not, and should not be treated as a library of malevolent apps that should be avoided.

Many of the apps are used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide such as; Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram. Apps and websites are included within the social media library if their provenance can be found within CSE.

The Library consists of 6 columns:
1. NAME – the name of the app/website
2. LOGO – a pictorial representation of the logo of the app/website
3. DESCRIPTION – a brief description of the app/website
4. CATEGORY – the apps currently in the library are categorised as either 'content sharing', 'dating', 'gaming', or 'messaging'
5. WEBSITE – a link to the apps/websites official web page
6. DATE ADDED – the date the app/website was identified and added to the library.
The Social Media Library has been shared via email through the national network of Regional CSE Coordinators and Analysts and is also uploaded onto the CSE community on POLKA. Management and coordination of the Library is the responsibility of its creator, the Regional CSE Analyst for the West Midlands region. As soon as new apps/websites are identified through investigations in England and Wales, they are shared with the Regional CSE Analyst for the West Midlands region who adds them to the Library and disseminates it on a regular basis.

The feedback regarding the Library has been extremely positive and it has been shared with officers, analysts, CSE coordinators & practitioners, social care, children’s homes, and teachers. It has been described as an excellent research and training tool which has been used as a way to easily identify the threat and scale of social media within CSE. It has also been shared with Police Scotland and the National Crime Agency.

Strategy discussion aide memoire

The strategy discussion aide memoire was produced by Becky Lewis (Barnardos Children Services Manager), Rachel Allen (Ringham, Child Sexual Exploitation Consultant), Rachel Ringham Ltd, working with Bath and North East Somerset Local Authority and Detective Inspector Larisa Hunt, the South West Regional CSE Coordinator in conjunction with professionals from health, education and the NWG (National Working Group).

The aide memoire is designed to help professionals consider ways to safeguard children who have been sexually exploited. The document is to be used in addition to existing local authority strategy discussion processes and it is primarily designed for use in sit-down strategy meetings.

The aide memoire can however also be used as a prompt for telephone strategy discussions. The document was produced to assist professionals in their decision making and planning with regards to CSE.

A boy sat crossed legged in the corner with a police with an outstretched arm

Threat assessments and problem profiles

In 2015 when the CSE analyst and coordinator network was first established, the regional analysts were tasked with the production of a Regional CSE Problem Profile. The profile was to present the nature, scale and threat of CSE across each region in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the CSE picture nationally.

What is a problem profile?

The profiles incorporated a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques, whereby individual-level data was collected from forces and statutory and non-statutory partners were asked to complete questionnaires regarding details of CSE victims.

Questionnaires were seen as a less intrusive method of including a response from partner agencies that did not require personal level data but added substantially to the current picture of CSE at a regional level. The result was the production of ten comprehensive Regional Problem Profiles that for the first time included both police and partner data to enhance knowledge and understanding of the current scale and nature of CSE at a regional and national level.

The profiles presented detailed recommendations, which were actioned accordingly, through the construction of the Regional CSE Action Plan and subsequently driven by the Coordinator and Analyst network to ensure national consistency.
Threat assessments

What has since been developed by the South West regional analyst is a CSE Threat Assessment. This document looks at the Risk, Response and Results of CSE activity across the region every month.

It therefore provides current information that can be acted on by senior management. Regional analysts populate the document alongside information provided by local forces. The document has been adopted in several regions, some producing the item monthly and others quarterly. It is often discussed as a fixed item on the Agenda at CSE Strategic Governance Groups and has generally received a very positive response.