Making sense of child sexual exploitation: Exchange, Abuse and Young People

Recent scandals from throughout the United Kingdom have lifted the problem of child sexual exploitation to near the top of the social policy agenda. But amid the furor, some key questions have been ignored. What makes child sexual exploitation different from other forms of child abuse? What do we know about why it happens? And what approaches are most effective for stopping it? In this book, Sophie Hallett argues that we need to use the exchange model—an approach lost in the current focus on ‘grooming’—to answer these questions. The book draws heavily on the voices of children and young people who have experienced sexual exploitation and the social work practitioners who have worked with them, to challenge mainstream discourse around child sexual exploitation, arguing that it is much more widespread than thought and that we must reorient our thinking about it if we want to succeed in preventing it.