Sexual Exploitation and Its Impact on Developing Sexualities and Sexual Relationships: The Need for Contextual Social Work Interventions

Abstract

This article considers how young people's developing sexualities are influenced by extra-familial social and cultural contexts, particularly in relation to experiences of sexual violence. It draws upon young people's voices to illustrate the choices they make when they encounter, or engage with, exploitative contexts. Utilising the cumulative evidence base of our studies into sexual exploitation, trafficking and violence over the past ten years, we employ Bourdieu's theory of the interplay between structure and agency to elucidate the relationship between young people's choices and abusive social environments. When navigating or engaging with exploitative contexts, young people's sexualities can be distorted through abusive normalising processes; coercive practices; professional attitudes which condone abuse; and/or structural inequalities that call for survivalist behaviours amongst young people. In exploring this social model of consent, we highlight the need to move beyond one to one (1:1) social work practices to engage with situations, contexts and relationships that disrupt young people's developing sexualities. Such an adaptation of social work practice would adopt principles of 'contextual safeguarding' and we conclude by offering illustrations of interventions that have begun to explore this developmental pathway.

The Perceptions of Australian Workers about Caring for Sexually Exploited Children in Residential Care

“…However, children may perceive their experience of sexual exploitation in very different terms to workers and policymakers. A child may think that they are in love with the perpetrator (Barnardo's, ), or a child who has been sexually abused since infancy may perceive abuse as normal (Firmin et al ., ). Such a child may attempt to gain some agency over the sexual abuse experience by making the exploiter pay.…”

“…In a study undertaken by Firmin et al . (), the authors explore how children's sexualities are influenced by sexual exploitation. They synthesised various findings from their previous work about children and sexual exploitation and found that children's sexualities can be skewed in different ways: through discourses that normalise abuse or blame the victim; or through structural inequalities whereby children are forced into exploitation in order to survive.…”

Adapting a family intervention to reduce risk factors for sexual exploitation

“…What we know about CSE has evolved over time and spans from the micro-to macrosystem of the ecological model. Initially, microsystem research on CSE explored the lived experiences of youth impacted by CSE [26][27][28]. Youth homelessness, which crosses multiple systems, ranges from the micro to the meso level because of the multiple factors that are influential.…”

Failing victims, fuelling hate: challenging the harms of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ narrative

“…An increased focus on opportunities also opens up new avenues to intervention, such as contextual safeguarding. 177 An approach to understanding and tackling harm outside the family, contextual safeguarding considers the immediate physical and social environments in which harm occurs and how places and practices might be modified to reduce risk and build resilience. Greater adoption of such approaches would help shift away from generic 'prevention' through one-size-fits-all awareness-raising or education at one end of the spectrum and prosecution at the other.…”