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Campaign success stories

Barnardo's campaigners help to transform the lives of children and young people. Sign up to be a Barnardo's campaigner and be the first to know about our latest campaigns.

Cut them free campaign

Cut her free from sexual exploitation

With the help of Barnardo’s campaigners we’ve achieved some great success in our campaign to tackle child sexual exploitation.

In England

The National Action Plan covers England and sets out how the public, professionals, councils and agencies can work to identify exploitation and provide the right support when it’s identified. The Plan also guides the criminal justice system to ensure that the welfare of victim’s gets priority when they go to court to give evidence against their perpetrator.

In Scotland

A programme of action was announced in January 2013 to tackle child sexual exploitation in Scotland was announced by Minister for Children and Young People. This programme has pledged:

  • to pilot improved identification of potential victims, many of whom do not recognise themselves as victims of abuse
  • improve the way child sexual exploitation is identified by Scotland’s new single police force to make this form of abuse more visible
  • encourage victims to come forward through a new National Confidential Forum, providing a safe space where victims can share their experiences, and
  • a new expert group to capture the lessons of sexual exploitation cases elsewhere in the UK, harnessing the expertise of the public and third sector, and make recommendations to the Scottish Government for further action and research

Across the UK

Our Cut them free campaign has also achieved:

  • Nearly 1800 people took action to get their Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) to pledge, if elected to support our campaign. This means that of 41 newly elected commissioners, 23 are committed to tacking child sexual exploitation.
  • 13,000 campaigners supported our work which saw 107 Councils in England sign up to do everything they can to tackle child sexual exploitation.
  • Over 3,000 people signed Barnardo’s Scotland petition on child sexual exploitation. As a result, the Minister for Children and Young People has made a series of important commitments to take action on child sexual exploitation, including updating the 2010 National Child Protection Guidelines and commissioning research into the nature and scale of the CSE in Scotland.
  • Campaigners in Northern Ireland seem likely to secure child sexual exploitation as a priority of the Safeguarding Board.
  • In Wales, policies on child sexual exploitation were so advanced that campaigners have simply needed to encourage the other nations to catch up!

But there is still more to be done

  • We need those PCCs in England and Wales who signed up to our campaign to keep to their pledge to tackle child sexual exploitation in their local plans
  • We need to ensure that the Government maintains this issue as a priority
  • It’s vital that we have a national reporting mechanism to store data on all cases of child sexual exploitation, so that we can understand where instances of sexual exploitation are happening around the UK.
  • We need the justice system to see young victims of sexual exploitation as children.

If you’re not already a Barnardo’s campaigner, sign up today and join 1000s of other people campaigning to tackle child sexual exploitation.