Meeting of the Parliament 28 January 2014
I thank Margaret Mitchell for the clear interest that she takes in working to ensure that some of the issues that we are discussing are dealt with adequately. I mentioned that we have done a number of pieces of work to refresh guidance. In November 2012, we published the “National Framework for Child Protection learning and development in Scotland 2012” and the risk assessment framework. More specifically on the point about health professionals, in December 2012 we updated the pink book, which is for health professionals, on child protection issues. I hope that many of the issues that the member refers to about how we can empower and help health professionals are captured in that pink book, which was published just over a year ago.
We need to keep under review the services that directly support those who experience child sexual exploitation. We need to know which services have the best impact and how they can be sustained within a service framework that must address a wide range of child protection issues. We also need to understand why some services, not least refuges for runaways, have struggled to remain sustainable. I will therefore ask the ministerial working group on child sexual exploitation to explore how we can better understand and promote the most effective services to support children and young people. I hope that that will give some comfort to the committee and its convener, given his remarks about investigating further issues to do with refuges.
Against that background of how we are addressing the needs of children and young people overall, we have also taken a range of actions across Government to address child sexual exploitation. We have committed to understanding the issue better because, like the committee, we recognise the gaps in our knowledge of such abuse. We commissioned the University of Bedfordshire to examine the scale and nature of child sexual exploitation in Scotland. We have also supported work, which is currently being piloted in Forth valley, to improve ways of identifying and collating information on child sexual exploitation cases at a local level. Other areas might require more research, and we will continue to review such research needs.
We are working to ensure that all local areas have procedures and protocols in place to address child sexual exploitation. In the national child protection guidance, we will set out our expectations that every local area has such a protocol and will develop a national good practice model.
Schools also have a particularly important role in identifying and preventing child sexual exploitation. National work is helping to support that. Children and young people receive education on topics such as developing appropriate relationships, protection from abuse and keeping themselves safe from harm from early on in their education right up until they leave school.
In that context, the work on improving internet safety among children and young people is critical. In early December, the Minister for Learning, Science and Scotland’s Languages and I chaired a summit on internet safety, which drew in experts from education, the third sector, the private sector and law-enforcement bodies. The members of that summit also included Jackie Brock, who is involved with the ministerial working group, to ensure that there is a sequencing of knowledge about what action we need to take. They made a set of recommendations that I have asked the Scottish stakeholder group on internet safety to develop into a series of practical actions that will be reported back to ministers before the end of the year.