Desire lines (4)

On April 26 this year I had the opportunity to participate and contribute to a workshop on improving responses to child sexual exploitation (CSE) that was organised by the University of Bedfordshire’s International Centre Researching Child Sexual Exploitation, Violence and Trafficking. I don’t know anything about CSE, although a couple of the publicised cases in Rochdale and Rotherham, England back in 2012 had given me a lot of pause for thought in relation to ‘listening’ and participation; I was there to give a perspective on children’s participation and to share thinking from the Connectors Study. It was this earlier post, as well as the Children & Society paper on childhood publics and last year’s earliest political memories series, that caught the organisers’ attention as a way of re-thinking what we might mean by participation in childhood. It was an excellent event with lots of great contributions, not least from young people themselves, about how the acoustics of frontline services might be fine tuned. An event report has been created by Lucie Shuker and can be accessed here. There is also an audio recording of my presentation here.