Loudmouth Education and Training has been using applied theatre to raise young people's awareness of safeguarding and exploitation issues for 25 years. Over that time our focus has mainly focused on Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE). We have felt for a long time that we have wanted to open up our work to look at child exploitation in its wider sense and with a growing call for this from LSCBs, the police and education, we decided earlier this year to create a new programme on CE. We are really excited about the development of this programme as it will look at county lines, modern day slavery and trafficking as well CSE and other related issues such as youth violence and knife crime.
Earlier this year we sent out a survey as part of the development of our new Child Exploitation programme. We had a great response from a wide range of organisations including schools, councils, police and charities. We have run and continue to run interviews with key professionals and young people to help shape the focus the development of our work.
We wanted to share with you the key areas and themes that have emerged so far and that we will factor into the development of our child exploitation programmes.
The Top 10 Key Themes
The responses flagged up many different issues and approaches that respondents suggested. We grouped these into themes and the list below shows the responses in order (with number 1 being the theme that was most mentioned in responses and so on)
1. Grooming process / Spotting signs
2. Wider examples of exploitation including County Lines, Modern Slavery, Trafficking and Missing
3. Online Grooming / Grooming via technology
4. Strategies and signposting
5. Healthy / safe relationships
6. Understanding that there is not one type of victim / perpetrator
7. Challenging victim blaming
8. Trauma
9. Risks including violence and knife crime
10. The legal position on Child Exploitation
95% of responses said that the programme should be aimed at Key Stage 3. 97% said Key Stage 4 and 70% wanted the programme for Key Stage 5. As a result the programme will be available for all secondary and college age students with the workshop pitched appropriately for different years.
A huge thanks to all of the organisations and professionals who completed the survey as well as the professionals who gave their time to be interviewed including Craig Pinkney, Anne Rannard, Helen Matthews, Lynette Reid, Sandeep Kaur Gill, Toni Welch, Dot Johnson, Kay Wallace and Steve Baguely at NWG.
We are now busy working on the new drama and workshop elements and will be presenting an early version of a new monologue on criminal exploitation at the NWG conference in March 19 (where we have been nominated for the Unsung Hero award!)
We have also started to introduce some of the suggestion and research into our existing Working for Marcus programme and this now includes activities that explore criminal exploitation and the exploitation of young men. You can book sessions now by ringing 0121 446 4880.
The development will continue over the next few months and the brand new drama elements and workshop will be used in schools from September 2019.
If you have anything you would like to add or have any questions on these please contact us on 0121 446 4880.