The Disrupting Exploitation (DEx) programme works one-to-one with young people who are victims of child criminal exploitation and their parents or carers. Funded by the National Lottery Community Fund, DEx has been working across Greater Manchester, Birmingham, and London since 2018. We are committed to changing the systems around young people and we are passionate about sharing our knowledge on systems change widely across the sector. To achieve this, we work in partnership with others.
You can make a referral online for our direct work with a young person or parent or carer.
Our systems change work intervenes to disrupt exploitation and improve responses to young people who are being exploited. We focus on three workstreams: school exclusions, crime and custody, and transitions.
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New resource! Exploitation practice guide:
Our Exploitation Practice Guide is a resource which sets out to improve legal support for children and young people experiencing exploitation. This resource is designed to guide legal professionals, primarily defence solicitors, and others working in the criminal justice system to improve support for children and young people who have been exploited or where exploitation may have taken place. It is designed to support solicitors to have a more consistent approach in responding to and understanding exploitation. For next steps, we are wanting to hear directly from legal professionals and firms to gain feedback around the resource. As part of this, we have created an offer to be shared out with firms interested in taking part. There are limited spaces for this, and to find out more firms can contact [Sana Ali](Sana Ali).
Working groups: we hold a bimonthly working group to bring together partners to discuss exploitation issues. The next meeting takes place online at 11am on 13 August 2024. If you would like to find out more or be added to the invitation list please message **our team inbox.**
Our school exclusions workstream aims to improve recognition of and access to appropriate support pathways for young people. This will prevent exclusion and exploitation and challenge existing exclusion policies, processes, and structures that disproportionately affect certain groups. Current projects include rolling out our behaviour policy checklist, a resource which was co-produced with young people to support schools to develop inclusive behaviour policies. This has been created by a group of young people who have experienced school exclusion and now advocate for other young people facing school exclusion. They have developed a ‘behaviour policy checklist’ through a number of youth-led peer consultations with groups of young people in London. We have also developed an exploitation awareness toolkit to support secondary schools, along with a number of other resources and reports.
Our crime and custody workstream raises awareness and improves practice in response to exploitation within legal processes and aims to create a preventative multi-agency response to arrest and contact with the criminal justice system for young people at risk of exploitation. Current projects include embedding our recently published exploitation practice guide for legal professionals. We have also produced free resources on topics like the national referral mechanism.
We are currently scoping and mapping the issue of peer-on-peer violence in Birmingham as an issue impacting on children and families at risk of or experiencing child exploitation.
Our newest peer-on-peer violence workstream seeks to develop a shared understanding of the relationship between violence and exploitation and to support the development of early intervention and preventative multi-agency responses to peer-on-peer violence for young people at risk of exploitation.
https://forms.office.com/e/tbU7J2ZchZ
Systems change is a process of working collaboratively with people, often across different groups, to understand and address the root causes of disadvantage for young people and the factors that contribute to child exploitation. It aims to redesign systems and influence the people, processes, rules, power, and structures that they consist of to achieve positive, long-lasting change. Systems change at its heart involves identifying opportunities to innovate, learn, and adapt.
Systems change supports our direct, frontline work with young people and organisations and provides opportunities for us to reach a wider audience to help us achieve our ultimate goal of reducing the risk and prevalence of child exploitation.
The DEx programme has designed a theory of change to inform the direction of our systems change work. The programme’s overarching priorities constitute our way of working and our offer to all partners, whether they are stakeholders, young people, or parents and carers.
You can make a referral online for a systems change opportunity in partnership with DEx.
Partnership working is vital for systems change and for our direct work. By working with others, we seek to:
Our partnership principles and local offers provide further details.