The West Yorkshire Risk and Vulnerability Strategy Group was formerly known as the West Yorkshire Child Sexual Exploitation Strategy Group. The group’s aims were to bring key partners together to ensure an effective and consistent response is provided to all children and young persons across West Yorkshire who are at risk of child sexual abuse or those that are being or have been sexually abused.
This group has recently evolved with the current and emerging demands of West Yorkshire into the West Yorkshire Risk and Vulnerability Strategy Group. As well as continuing this work, the newly formed group has a widened remit to encompass children who go missing across geographical boundaries and its interconnectivity with other safeguarding concerns such as child sexual exploitation, peer on peer abuse, harmful sexual behaviour, child trafficking and modern day slavery, and going missing.
Who sits on the group?
- West Yorkshire Police
- Local safeguarding boards
- Other key statutory partners
Aims and remit of the group:
The objectives of the West Yorkshire Risk and Vulnerability Strategy Group will focus on four main areas; prepare, prevent, protect and pursue.
- To establish comprehensive and accurate ‘profiles’ to ensure the identification of individuals or groups, locations and patterns and trends across borders, to enable these to inform local partnership understanding, and enable swift coordinated multi-agency responses to effectively safeguard children and prevent, divert or prosecute those who facilitate and/or seek exploit and abuse.
- To inform local service provision and share good practice enabling appropriate support, intervention, and protection to children, young people, parents, carers, friends and communities via a multi-agency child friendly, child centred, whole family approach, empowering children and communities to better protect themselves.
- To prevent children being vulnerable to harm and abuse from going missing and to prevent children experiencing or continuing to experience exploitation, peer on peer abuse and modern day slavery by reducing vulnerability and proactively responding to information and intelligence shared about individuals.
- Use information intelligently to inform successful prevention, diversion and prosecution of those who seek to facilitate and/or perpetrate the exploitation, abuse and harm of children and young people and where any offences relate to young people, ensuring that children are responded to, supported and if necessary prosecuted, with a child centred approach.
*The aims and remit outlined here are draft and subject to change.
