The Youth Justice Plan for 2014-16 will lay out the way forward around managing work with young offenders, including crime prevention, restorative justice and how links will be made to wider Integrated Offender Management work.
Other services will also continue to support the well-being of children, young people and their families. These include the substance misuse service, youth service and the Integrated Team for Families, safeguarding and housing.
The ‘Early Help Hub’ and ‘Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub’ are relatively new initiatives to coordinate the network of agencies which are able to identify and respond to the needs of young people in order to reduce risks and harm.
Work which addresses child to parent violence will be further developed.
Child sexual exploitation, where children or young people receive ‘something’ in exchange for their involvement in sexual activities can have acute impacts. There can be links with young people going missing, increased prevalence for those within the care system, be linked to substance misuse, and result in health needs. Work in this area is to be stepped up to raise awareness, improve identification, assess and reduce risks, protect victims and bring offenders to justice. In 2013 the Local Safeguarding Children Board and the Violence against Women and Girls Programme Board agreed a joint child sexual exploitation strategy and actions to address this issue have been included specifically within the Community Safety and Crime Reduction Strategy 2014-17 in order to better co-ordinate response and identify links to other crime types, for example violence against women and girls and modern slavery.