Why extra-familial harm still escapes child protection

Although our child protection system was built around the family, today a great deal of risk faced by young people is extra-familial. Why are children experiencing exploitation, grooming, or coercive control often misunderstood by safeguarding systems, particularly when harm occurs outside the family home? 

Decades of state inquiry, review and precedent indicate that part of the answer to this question lies in the fact that we still lack the data to be clear about the extent of those extra familial risks and therefore the detail of how to disrupt them. Another issue is that our tools to disrupt such risk are blunt instruments, only available for the most serious cases. 

Misunderstanding agency The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’s investigation into organised networks, in which I was lead counsel for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, found missed opportunity was rooted in a view of children as having choice and agency. One important recommendation focussed on the language we use about young people. The report identified victim-blaming language that, in its terms, “places responsibility, shame or blame onto a child for their own exploitation” and highlighted that professionals were referring to abuse as “risky behaviour” or “risky” choices. 

A child cannot consent to their own exploitation, and what looks like consent is often the product of grooming. Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023 took the term “extra-familial harm” and required it to be weighed in every children’s social care assessment. A system originally designed to identify and manage risk within the family will also struggle to protect a teenager harmed outside it, whether by adults or by other children. When harm from outside the home reaches a courtroom, the pull is towards the parent who is there rather than the network that is not. 

But extra-familial risk is significant yet unclear. Professor Alexis Jay’s 2014 report found at least 1,400 children exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Baroness Louise Casey’s 2025 audit found the data so poor that the ethnicity of perpetrators went unrecorded in around two-thirds of cases, and that children were still disbelieved. A statutory national inquiry was convened following the audit. One of its tasks is to explain why fifteen years of findings have changed so little. The state and public authorities are responding. 

The Crime and Policing Act 2026 creates an offence of child criminal exploitation (s.48), makes grooming an aggravating factor in sentencing (s.83), and makes it a crime to obstruct a report (s.92). The 2026 Act creates offences aimed at AI-generated abuse images and at the online facilitation of exploitation (ss.72–77). The Online Safety Act’s illegal-content duties have applied since March 2025. The new duty to report, however, covers only child sexual abuse, not criminal exploitation, radicalisation or other harm outside the family. 

Even for abuse, it is triggered only by a disclosure or the sighting of an image, not by the behaviour that most often signals harm (ss.85, 87). Gaps that remain One thread runs through these inquiries. In its work on child sexual abuse, IICSA found that concerns were kept inside institutions instead of being reported to the people who could act, which is the reason for the new duty to report. There is a reluctance in agencies to look squarely at the risks young people face outside the home and to record the key data.