Research and analysis - Child sexual abuse and exploitation: recording practices in children’s social care and serious incident reporting

In June 2025 Safeguarding Network shared Baroness Casey's audit on what is commonly referred to as 'grooming gangs' - the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.

The audit was one in a long line of initiatives and measures looking into child sexual exploitation undertaken since the government adopted its first definition in 2009. Reviews and strategies on child sexual exploitation have raised the same issues repeatedly: system failures in information sharing, the need for more training, understanding of risk factors of victims, and the importance of collecting better data and information on perpetrators.

One of the concerns has been a persistent difference between police recorded child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE) and what is visible in children’s social care data, particularly the Children in Need (CIN) census and Serious Incident Notifications (SINs). To explore this anomaly, the Department for Education (DfE) commissioned a qualitative study to explore how CSAE is identified, assessed, recorded and reported within Children’s Social Care practice.

Key findings:

• Positively, the findings suggest that under-recording may be shaped by a range of system-level factors rather than indicating issues with frontline practice.

• Practitioners felt they had more confidence in naming and recording CSAE when they had space for reflection, access to training on the subject and evidence-based tools to use from authoritative sources.

• Current data systems are badly aligned with the reality of CSAE safeguarding practice – where harm is rarely found in single incidents and is often part of co-occurring harms and evolving patterns of risk.

• Much CSAE safeguarding practice is addressed using (often comprehensive) locally designed systems, with few national tools and standards for recording this form of harm. Where there are guidelines, how they should be applied often remains unclear.

Read the research

If you’d like more of an insight into what exploitation is and ideas as to how to identify this and what to do in your day-to-day work, visit our resources pages.

• Child exploitation

• Child sexual exploitation

• Child criminal exploitation

Safeguarding Network members have access to a whole suite of resources in order to train all school staff about this important and pervasive issue.