'Lack of evidence' on effectiveness of care home CSE support

The Department for Education report, Child Sexual Exploitation: Support in Children's Residential Homes, involved interviews with staff at 10 homes involved in such support, four of which were subject to an in-depth review.

This found work being carried out to support victims was not being robustly evidenced, with homes unable to back up claims that such work was successful.

Staff at many of the homes looked at in the report highlighted a number of improvements in victims' lives as a result of work they did with them, including removing the risk of further exploitation, building resilience and confidence, and boosting educational attainment.

But too often "information on the progress children made in relation to different outcomes was based mainly on non-systematic and unstructured observations by staff".

In addition, none of the homes the research team looked at collected long-term data about children's outcomes after they had left the settings.

The research team concluded that "while homes reported positive outcomes for children affected by CSE" the evidence to confirm this was "generally lacking".

The structure of support programmes was also not backed by robust evidence. For example, homes had developed a range of tools to carry out CSE risk assessments "but it was not clear what evidence was used to develop these tools and the extent to which they had been tested".

The report also said that the placement of children affected by CSE is based on guesswork, rather than clear evidence.

Assumptions that victims do better in small, single-sex settings "have not been tested and we do not know if they hold for both sexes" the report states.

Also the "widely held assumption that removing children affected by CSE from their community and placing them in very remote areas helps to keep them safe" was questioned in the report, as "there is no evidence to support this".

The report calls for homes to be given better access to evidence of effective support, including lists of tools and programmes that have been evaluated and proved to be successful.

Homes also need more information about effective psychological and therapeutic interventions.

Currently cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is the only one recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence for victims of sexual abuse. "However, this does not mean that other therapies would not work," the report adds.

Despite the report's concerns about how support is being evidenced, a range of good practice was highlighted.

This includes strong relationships between homes and police, which helped establish trust between officers and children. This also lead to improved information sharing, with officers telling managers about emerging CSE "hotspots" locally.

In one home police officers also provided self-defence classes for children, the report found.