“Excellent” report should be part of Munro review

BASW’s chief executive has urged Barnardo’s to submit its hard-hitting report on sexual grooming to the Munro enquiry into child protection.

Speaking on BBC’s Five Live, Hilton Dawson described the report, which calls on the government to appointment a minister with responsibility for protecting children, as “excellent”.

But he added that the children’s charity needed to send its findings to Professor Munro, who has been carrying out a review of the child protection system since last summer. “It was absolutely the way into government at the moment,” he said.

The report has found children as young as 13 are being sexually exploited and trafficked across the country and warns they are being left vulnerable by a lack of knowledge about the problem that stretches from frontline professionals to top-level government.

“Until we really put children first in our society, face up to the problems and engage with these communities…then we are not going to make progress,” Mr Dawson said.

He added that while it was easy to see that children in care and those on the fringes of the care system were particularly vulnerable to exploitation it was a problem that affected all communities.