By Professor Michelle McManus
In June 2025, the government announced a national inquiry into group-based child sexual exploitation (CSE) to oversee reviews of multi-agency safeguarding failures, prompted by Baroness Casey’s national audit on grooming gangs.
The headlines spoke of collective failure and broken systems, along with new government promises of stronger data sharing, clearer accountability and improved multi-agency working.
But for frontline social workers, this moment isn't just a policy turning point, it's a practice dilemma. How do we keep children safe in a system still shaped by silos, varying thresholds, and a professional environment that too often misinterprets or downplays signs of harm?
Based on my research, reviews of practice, and decades of work across safeguarding and exploitation, here are some critical issues social workers need to consider and, importantly, be supported to act on.
Seeing children as children
Social workers are trained to see context: to recognise the child behind the behaviour, the need behind the resistance. But in both child sexual exploitation (CSE) and child criminal exploitation (CCE), this understanding is still too often missing, especially when the child is a teenager.
The Casey audit highlighted a particular blind spot in how services respond to children aged 13 to 15. At this age, many are seen as “making choices” rather than being groomed or coerced.
A child carrying drugs, holding cash or refusing to engage may be framed as criminal, complicit, or simply “streetwise”, rather than recognised as exploited. Yet these are exactly the children most likely to fall through the gaps within multi-agency protection arrangements.
We must hold firm to what we know: that exploited children may not identify as victims. They may mistrust adults, resist help or push away support. But this does not make them safe.
As I wrote recently in The Conversation: “When professionals view teenagers as complicit, consenting, or ‘making choices’, they stop seeing the child in need of protection.”
If safeguarding is to mean anything, it must apply even when the child doesn’t ask for it.
How segregating exploitation increases risk to children
Our systems still divide harm into categories: CSE here, CCE there, gang activity over there. But real life doesn’t work like that. These labels often overlap, and even when they don’t, children can still fall through the gaps.
Social workers have long highlighted the risks of misclassification. A young person may be flagged as involved in ‘gangs’ when the underlying issue is exploitation. Or a case may focus on ‘risk-taking behaviour’ without naming the coercion at play.
We need integrated, child-centred safeguarding that doesn’t rely on ticking boxes, but on understanding what’s really happening in a child’s life.
Many areas have moved to a more unified approach to child exploitation, with evidence submitted by me and a colleague to Parliament’s education select committee last year indicating clear evidence for this.
Despite the structural challenges, social workers continue to offer some of the most effective safeguarding responses, especially when working relationally and across systems.
When practitioners are supported to understand children in the context of their peers, families and communities, safeguarding becomes not just reactive, but responsive.
When children can’t or won’t engage
Trauma-informed practice is now a core expectation across safeguarding. But it can create confusion when professionals are given mixed messages, especially around what it means to be ‘victim-led’.
When a child doesn’t want to engage, or actively resists support, some practitioners are left unsure whether they can or should intervene.
In research into safeguarding partnerships' responses to county lines and serious youth violence, carried out by me and colleagues for the Home Office and Department for Education, professionals described this dilemma clearly.
Without disclosure or a statutory threshold, they often felt stuck, even when their professional judgment told them a child was being exploited.
As one practitioner put it: “If the child is holding, it’s harder to get people to see them as exploited. They just see the crime, not the coercion behind it.”
This is where being trauma-informed must go beyond respecting autonomy. It must recognise that many children won’t identify as victims because they’ve been groomed not to. Their behaviour may appear confrontational, even criminal, but it’s often self-protective. Silence or refusal doesn’t mean there is no harm.
This confusion is compounded by legal frameworks that still require children to disclose or ‘prove’ their victim status.
In CCE cases especially, the law relies on proving that an adult intended to exploit the child, without any statutory presumption of harm. This means that unless a child discloses or presents as vulnerable, the system may not intervene, even when the signs are obvious.
Learning from good social work, not just failure
Much of what makes safeguarding work isn’t captured in reviews. It lives in the moments where social workers persist, challenge, continually ask questions and keep showing up for a child who pushes them away.
We hear a lot about what goes wrong. But we need to be louder about what goes right. Because every day, there are social workers building safety plans, forming trusting relationships and preventing harm, often outside of formal thresholds.
Imagine what it could mean for workforce confidence, and for the children we serve, if good social work was recognised and shared with the same urgency as failure.
Why mandated data sharing isn’t the sole answer
Among Casey’s recommendations was to mandate information sharing by all statutory safeguarding partners in cases of child sexual abuse (CSA) and exploitation, with compliance monitored by inspectorates and overseen by the new Child Protection Authority (CPA).
The government will implement this through the duty in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to require agencies to disclose information for the purposes of safeguarding or promoting the welfare of children.
It has also pledged to work with inspectorates, such as Ofsted, to embed the information sharing duty in accountability frameworks, and ensure the CPA provides national oversight to ensure improvements in this area.
Mandated data-sharing will help remove some barriers. But it won’t solve the deeper issues: lack of trust, fear of blame, organisational silos and safeguarding systems that still make it hard for professionals to act, even when the signs of harm are clear.
Safeguarding doesn’t fail purely due to a missing form. It fails when professionals don’t feel safe to act on what they know. We need safeguarding responses that enable early, decisive action, not those that wait for children to meet criteria never designed to reflect the realities of exploitation.
As one practitioner told us: “We’re encouraged to be curious, but when we are, we don’t get backed.” That has to change.
Policy promises versus practice realities
Alongside its response to the Casey audit, the government is also taking forward its response to the the seven-year Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which reported in 2022.
This includes developing specialist CSA/CSE training for social workers and other key members of the children’s services workforce, creating a new performance framework, with data collection requirements, for the police concerning CSA and CSE and establishing a victim and survivor panel to support and inform the government’s work in tackling CSA.
Meanwhile, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will introduce multi-agency child protection teams, to strengthen co-ordination of practice and improve decision making in safeguarding cases.
These are welcome intentions, but social workers will know that real change depends on more than policy pledges.
Efforts to clarify thresholds and multi-agency roles, as suggested by the Casey audit, could help reduce confusion about who holds risk. But unless social workers are supported with time, supervision and properly funded services, that ‘clarity’ won’t translate into practice.
Similarly, proposals for better training in CSE and CCE, or more lived experience involvement, will only be effective if they recognise the frontline reality: that children rarely disclose, and that engagement looks different when grooming and fear are part of the picture. Social workers already understand this. The reforms need to reflect and support that insight, not overwrite it.
If we want meaningful change, we must start by resourcing and respecting the people already holding the line.
Michelle McManus is professor of safeguarding and violence prevention and co-director of the Institute for Children’s Futures at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work has directly shaped safeguarding practice and policy across the UK, supporting frontline professionals, local partnerships and national reform efforts to improve responses to child exploitation and abuse.
