Dozens of Lancashire children being helped after displaying 'inappropriate sexualised behaviour'

More Lancashire children are being supported after showing inappropriate sexualised behaviourMore Lancashire children are being supported after showing inappropriate sexualised behaviour
More Lancashire children are being supported after showing inappropriate sexualised behaviour
More than 100 Lancashire children have been referred to a new service designed to tackle “harmful sexualised behaviour" - in just the 12 months since it was established.

The specialist hub - set up by the Lancashire Child and Youth Justice Service - has seen the number of consultations carried out about youngsters causing concern almost double from 43 between April 2022 and March 2023 to 82 during the 2024 calendar year.

In total, 117 youngsters have been brought to the attention of the hub over since January 2024, 30 of whom have been the subject of “mapping meetings” to better understand the reasons for their inappropriate behaviour.

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The figures were revealed at a recent meeting of Lancashire County Council’s children, families and scrutiny committee.

The authority’s child and youth justice senior manager, Hannah Blower, said the hub had enabled the county to go from working with “a very small number of children” to offering a much broader service. She said it provided the opportunity to dig deeper into “the context of [the] lived experience” of children brought to the attention of the service - as well as to undertake more “standalone, specialist assessments” to help them.

Members also heard that the hub was taking a pre-emptive approach, looking to head off any potential problems, rather than waiting until they had emerged.

“We’re getting upstream…[and] we’re going to work more within our early help partners - particularly the children and family wellbeing service - to offer more consultative support for those staff, to address…concerns at the earliest possible opportunity,” Ms. Blower explained.

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She said that while the work being done was not a statutory requirement for a youth justice service, it was an issue that had been acknowledged as one “that we needed to do better [about] within Lancashire”.

The creation of the hub has also resulted in assessments of children displaying harmful sexualised behaviour being brought in-house at the county council, having previously been contracted out to third-party providers.

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