Co-designing community resilience to online child sexual victimisation

This project will develop approaches aimed at preventing online child sexual victimisation.

Led by Professor Corinne May-Chahal (Lancaster University) and Professor Adam Crawford (University of York and University of Leeds), the research team will look at online child sexual victimisation (OCSV) in Blackpool. They will explore current preventative efforts from organisations across police, education, health, social care and the voluntary sector in Blackpool. In collaboration with these services as well as parents, children and young people, and community members, a preventative tool will be developed to tackle this growing problem. 

The team hope to co-develop an Online Child Sexual Victimisation Quality Standards Framework (OCSVQSF) to improve prevention work. In other areas of interpersonal violence, particularly domestic violence, tools have been developed to enhance early intervention and support service provision for vulnerable groups.

In the field of health, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has supported action in countries across the world to develop a Quality Standards Approach. The team proposes adapting this approach to OCSV in one local area, to provide a set of standards and indicators that practitioners and stakeholders can refer to as a means of measuring best practices and identifying risk.

Therefore, this project seeks to develop a quality standards framework for OCSV with input from those who work within this field (practitioners, police), but also with families, communities, and those with lived experiences of online abuse, in Blackpool. The project will assess how effective the framework is, hoping that it can be adopted in different areas across the UK and around the world.

Publications and outputs

This video expresses what children want and need to help them keep safe online. It was created by the Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre, as part of a project which seeks to identify best practice to address online child sexual abuse and exploitation. Children from two Blackpool youth clubs (The Boathouse Youth and the Boys and Girls Club), between the ages of 6 and 15, made the video with the help of a local spoken word artist (Nathan Parker). It was co-produced by facilitating several creative workshops and discussions to develop a script and discuss the storyboard, design and sound of the video with the children.

Project website

https://vulnerabilitypolicing.org.uk/online-child-sexual-victimisation/