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The Home Office consultation document currently out for comments describes giving agencies a duty to report concerns about violence. Seeking to place a “statutory duty” on agencies to prevent and tackle violence is very reminiscent of the Prevent approach, which has been criticised for demonising communities, making unrealistic demands of professionals, and complicating what is really a straightforward issue of safeguarding.
Professionals working with children already have a duty to protect them and try to reduce crime, and are actively working to try to achieve that. A legal duty doesn’t assist in any way with reducing the exploitation and criminalisation of children, and risks passing the buck onto staff and local agencies, who are very aware of the risks and challenges.
A realistic and effective public health approach might look like this:
- Tackle school exclusions, ‘off rolling’, managed moves and inadequate alternative provision. Keep children in mainstream schooling, giving schools the resources and support to manage that
- Invest in trauma support for children who have experienced abuse, bereavement, grooming, neglect, violence and discrimination. Proper therapeutic input as an alternative to a criminal justice response
- Identify as early as possible the children who are at risk, and provide good quality interventions which educate, support and give alternatives
- Recognise that when a child is living in such fear they carry a knife, there is something very wrong. The response needs to be about their safeguarding and welfare, not to punish them. Abandon the regressive idea of Knife Crime Prevention Orders, which would only further criminalise fear and exploitation
- A bespoke children’s iteration of the National Referral Mechanism to be developed, with quick turnaround times for assessment and resources to respond when it is recognised that a child has been exploited. Automatic removal of convictions related to the exploitation, services in place to protect that child and their family, remove them from harm and pursue the adults exploiting them
- VRUs to tackle issues of data and information sharing across geographical areas and electronic systems, so that safeguarding information can be triangulated. Contextual safeguarding models to be used to map children’s and communities networks and plan interventions
- Train staff in areas such as public transport, Uber and similar vehicle hire, service stations in recognising the signs of County Lines exploitation, and have one, widely advertised, simple nationwide route for reporting concerns
- Reverse the damaging levels of cuts to policing, increase coverage of locally based neighbourhood teams
- Charge adults convicted of criminal exploitation of children with child abuse offences and penalties which are commensurate.
Violence affects our communities in the same way as disease, and only by concerted, resourced treatment methods will we start to bring it down. Let's look for policies which seek results over populism, and are collaborative rather than setting up targets for blame.