Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the implications for her policies of the findings of Barnardo’s recent campaign on the effect child sexual abuse.

The UK Government is committed to stamping out all forms of child sexual abuse.

We have made significant investments to improve our capabilities to tackle CSA offending, improve our safeguarding response and expand our support for victims and survivors, including through increased funding for support services across the country which victims and survivors can access throughout their lifetime. We have also invested in innovative approaches to tackling vulnerability among children and young people at-risk of exploitation and piloted innovative multi-agency support for those who have experienced sexual abuse.

The Home Office has also funded the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse to improve societal understanding of the scale and nature of child sexual abuse and the experiences of lesser heard communities.

However, we need to do more to drive a whole system response to child sexual abuse; this is why we have announced we will invest an additional £30 million to safeguard children from sexual abuse. Further, we will publish a first-of-its-kind national strategy to prevent and tackle all forms of child sexual abuse. We routinely engage with child protection charities and other experts including Barnardo’s on protecting children from child sexual abuse. This has included engagement on development of the Strategy, including through a third sector stakeholder group, which will meet at regular intervals to feed into current and future policy development surrounding child sexual abuse.