Working together to enhance police responses to child sexual exploitation and related vulnerabilities
Posted: Mon Jun, 2016
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Hello and welcome to our new CSE and Policing Hub, the website for our new project ‘working together to enhance policing responses to CSE and associated vulnerabilities in adolescence’. This project has been kindly funded by the Home Office, College of Policing and HEFCE as part of its ‘Knowledge Fund’; a funding package designed to improve academic and policing collaboration.
This is not about us, as academics, telling police how to do things, but about a partnership approach where we can help you use research evidence to support your work and you can help us make sure that the research we do is rooted in reality. As part of this commitment to two-way learning, we have seconded a police officer into the team to help direct the project - two months in, we are already greatly benefiting from the real life insights that he brings to our work.
The project will initially run until March 2017, although we hope to secure additional funding to continue it beyond this time. It has many different strands including sharing learning on how to do and use research; research informed briefing papers on CSE and associated vulnerabilities and academic mentoring for police-led research. We’re particularly excited about an initiative to bring together police and young people to collaboratively find solutions to the well documented challenges of police engagement with young people around these issues. For more information about these and other strands of the work, click here.
I am personally delighted to have such a wonderful team working with me on this project, both in the national hub at the University of Bedfordshire and in our regional hubs, and to be working in partnership with the National Policing Lead for Child Protection and Abuse Investigation and his team. I am confident that together – and in partnership with you and those affected by these issues – we can begin to address the challenges of working in this complex but vital area of policing.
Dr Helen Beckett, Lead Academic of the CSE and Policing Knowledge Hub
