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‘Hidden Girls and Young Women’: Complex exploitation and safeguarding across transitions

Delivered by The Children's Society and Changing Lives, ‘Hidden Girls and Young Women’: Complex exploitation and safeguarding across transitions

Gender norms impact young people’s experiences of exploitation. They shape the way professionals perceive and interact with them, influence the support they receive and the way that services are commissioned and designed. Ideas of gender can also be fundamental to the way that young people think about themselves, their identities, and their experiences of exploitation and abuse.

This session will focus in particular on the ways that girls and young women are all too often ‘hidden victims’ of criminal exploitation and county lines. When we view girls as potential victims of exploitation, there can be an assumption that such experiences are always and only sexual. This means that their experience of other types of harm, including criminal exploitation may be overlooked and other issues and support needs may not be identified.

Emerging insight and evidence suggest that young women may be particularly at risk across transitional stages and that person-centred, holistic approaches to transitional safeguarding may be key to responding to and preventing harm and abuse.

This session aims to:

• explore understandings of criminal exploitation of girls and young women and how these may be influenced by gendered assumptions
• challenge gender-based assumptions about young women’s experiences of exploitation
• create opportunities to consider the ways we identify, assess, and support young women who are criminally exploited
• Explore the implications for transitional safeguarding

Although this session will focus on the issues and experiences of criminally exploited young women, it will also acknowledge the implications of gender assumptions on young men and gender diverse young people who experience exploitation.

There are currently no dates for this event.