ChildLine launches campaign to expand child abuse prevention

Charity launches Now I Know, a £20m appeal and campaign to promote and fund programme in primary schools
“It’s about making things that might be difficult to talk about not unspoken,” says Lynn Brimmell, a ChildLine volunteer who has helped to deliver the pilot stage of the charity’s new Schools Service for nine to 11-year-olds.

Brimmell is one of 711 volunteers who have been going into primary schools to deliver assemblies on how children can recognise abusive behaviour, and how then to identify trusted adults that they can tell if they – or their peers – are experiencing it. The assembly is followed up two weeks later by a classroom workshop in which pupils discuss in more detail the issues that were raised – and that they may perhaps have been mulling since. Though some schools have been worried about explicitly naming different forms of abuse, Brimmell notes that children often know far more about it than they might normally be willing to say.

“We went to a school where the head had said the children weren’t that mature or advanced,” she says. “And when we asked a question about what might worry a child, one little girl said ‘being raped’ and the little boy sitting next to her said ‘yes, that’s when someone has sex with you and you don’t want them to’.”

The NSPCC operates ChildLine and has big ambitions for the new Schools Service: 3,685 primaries have already received the two-stage training, but the aim is that from 2016 it should be delivered by 3,000 volunteers in all 23,000 primary schools across the UK on a rolling “every other year” basis. The aim is that no child in years five and six – or years six and seven in Scotland and Northern Ireland – will miss out on the chance to identify different forms of abuse and what actions they can take to help themselves and their peers before serious harm is done. ChildLine will work with young children to help them understand and identify different forms of abuse in a way that’s tested, age-appropriate and sensitive to children of different abilities and levels of understanding.

The charity has launched a campaign and appeal – called Now I Know – which aims to raise £20m to promote and fund the service, which it believes is a bold new approach to prevention of child abuse.

This focus on prevention of abuse, rather than the predominant UK model of responding once a child has been hurt, has been driven by the charity’s concern that while over half a million children – 520,000 by its estimate – are being maltreated by a parent or guardian, only 58,000 were subject to a child protection plan in 2011. That gap, says the NSPCC, is “frightening”, particularly since child protection services are now so overstretched that the thresholds being set for any level of intervention are rapidly going up. The charity’s recent How Safe Are Our Children? report warns that “if children’s social services were to become aware of just one quarter of those children who were maltreated (but not currently known to them), we estimate the number of children subject to child protection plans or on registers in the UK would triple”.

The extra money – up to half a billion pounds – needed to pay for even this partial addressing of child abuse is clearly unlikely to be forthcoming, and besides, says the NSPCC, it wouldn’t stop those children being neglected, physically hurt, and emotionally and sexually abused. Tackling the harm done “upstream” of a crisis by taking an early intervention approach is increasingly becoming the charity’s focus: this initiative with primary schools was prompted by the fact that just 14% of children contacting ChildLine are aged under 11. Set this against the fact that on average at least two children in every primary classroom – over 120,000 – have suffered abuse or neglect, and the need for concerted, consistent preventative action seems overwhelming.

But is putting the focus on children to recognise abuse – and then identify and alert trusted adults – putting too much onus on those with the least power, and indeed with the most invested in relationships with the likely perpetrators: their family members?

Simon Bass, chief executive of CCPAS (the Churches’ Child Protection Advisory Service), says that while schools are well placed to teach children about personal safety, especially around online behaviour such as cyber bullying, “we must remember not to drum into children that it is solely their responsibility to protect themselves. Yes, of course they need to be told how to do so, but parents and those working with children also need to play a major part in ensuring children are kept safe.”

The ChildLine Schools Service is about empowering children and giving them information that starts to change their powerlessness in an abusive situation, says Lee Mitchell, head of the service. “It’s not about putting the responsibility for prevention on children. If you can equip children with the language and the knowledge that ‘what is happening to me isn’t right,’ you start to work for prevention.”

Jennifer Bernard, former director of social services in Newcastle upon Tyne and now a board member of the College of Social Work, agrees that the most successful educative measures are “probably those which involve children keeping themselves safe, having the personal confidence to repel attempts by strangers to do them harm and high enough self-esteem not to be taken advantage of by people pretending to offer them care or security to gain their confidence or keep them as victims… Programmes would include information provision about risk, but balanced by the development of the skills and confidence of young people to assess and manage them for themselves.”

Schools do already address abusive behaviours, but many tend to focus on bullying and some forms of physical abuse, rather than face directly the difficult and sensitive topic of sexual abuse and neglect. With the failure to adopt PSHE as part of the national curriculum and the increasing demands on schools for academic attainment, there is less time than ever for “optional” sessions focused on pupils’ safety, health and wellbeing.

“There is real pressure on the timetable,” confirms Bob Whitell, another NSPCC volunteer – and former primary head – who has been delivering the pilot. “With the best will in the world, for teachers who are trying to teach a lot of curriculum material, it would be hard to deliver that quality – the materials we use are very well researched.”

Geraldine Willders, headteacher at St Mary’s Catholic primary school in Lincolnshire, agrees, saying that when it came to the workshop session, “children were completely engrossed from beginning to end – they were able to go into a lot of depth.”

Some schools did express concerns about how parents would react to children discussing various forms of harm that adults can inflict on them. However, Sue Nightingale, pastoral worker at Christchurch Junior School in Dorset says that “Childline has thought that through and provides information for parents which outline what they’ll doing, and nobody did withdraw their child. It’s a bit like sex education; parents don’t quite know how to talk to their youngsters about it so it’s perhaps a bit of a sigh of relief.”

Mitchell acknowledges, however, that there are children not in mainstream education who will be much harder to reach. Pupils with special educational needs will require specially adapted material and in-school sessions. His team is also currently scoping how to deliver the programme to home-schooled children who are particularly vulnerable as they have no regular contact with professionals to whom they might disclose. Traveller children and children who are chronically or seriously ill are also groups that the charity knows it needs to find creative ways of engaging with.

Praise for the training to date has been almost universal, with 98% of teachers rating it as either excellent or good. Perhaps more importantly, 79% of children who had taken part subsequently correctly identified abusive scenarios, with 81% able to identify alternative scenarios that were not.

No matter how good this type of intervention, however, Willders says that schools must prioritise curriculum time to support what children have learned. “It’s a brilliant programme and it’s always good to get an outside person in – and it also heightens our own staff awareness,” she says. “But it is just one aspect, and what schools can’t do is say, right, that’s done then, and not continue with the work around it.”

Written by Louise Tickle for SocietyGuardian, to a brief agreed with ChildLine; funded by ChildLine. For more information and to support Now I Know visit nowiknow.org.uk