As we move into the new year, this feels like a good time to reflect on a busy and productive year for the CSA Centre – and hopefully for many of you working to tackle child sexual abuse across England and Wales.
For our part, we’ve been proud to help drive a renewed focus on this issue both locally and nationally, with several pieces of landmark legislation working their way through Parliament and a real drive from local safeguarding children partnerships (LSCPs) to make sure their multi-agency workforce can build the knowledge and skills they need to identify and respond to children (and their families) affected by child sexual abuse, with confidence.
Improving strategic responses
Following the publication of the national Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s report on child sexual abuse in the family environment in late 2024, for which the CSA Centre was proud to act as lead researchers and authors, the panel recommended that safeguarding partners develop local action plans in response to the review. So we published a new guide to help LSCPs build a strategic evidence-based strategy to do that.
We also updated and reissued our guidance on communicating with children, adding more detail on the variety of different communication needs that children may present with, supporting the Review’s clear message that practitioners can and should talk directly to children and families about concerns of child sexual abuse.
And we were encouraged by the Family Justice Council’s response to the Review’s concerns about the response to child sexual abuse in the family courts, agreeing to establish a new working group and looking at developing guidance for the judiciary when dealing with cases concerning intrafamilial sexual abuse in particular. The CSA Centre will be pleased to support this work over the coming year.
Working directly with practice
We continued to work directly with a large number of LSCPs, rolling out our Child Sexual Abuse Response Pathway to 24 areas across the North West and 12 in the West Midlands – speaking directly to more than 4000 professionals from those areas alone through a series of webinars and training events. Watch this space for a new interactive version of the Pathway!
We’ve delivered full day in-person roadshow events in Barnsley, Bradford and Greater Manchester, reaching more than 1000 professionals across the 12 local authority areas, while working with ten schools to develop a whole school framework for responding to sexual harm and supporting health visitors and midwives to more confidently ask about and respond to experiences of child sexual abuse. We’ve also been working closely with multi-agency partners across Warwickshire to test how child sexual abuse improvements can be driven through the Families First for Children reforms – with the number of children identified and supported through child protection plans for child sexual abuse more than quadrupling in the process.
Our training programme continues to grow, and across 2025 we trained more than 20,000 practitioners through a combination of full day events, online webinars, and our eLearning | CSA Centre package. Our ongoing programme of free one hour webinars has proved particularly popular, providing an accessible overview of key resources such as our Signs and Indicators Template, Sibling sexual behaviour guide, and Harmful Sexual Behaviour resources.
Improving support for victims and survivors
The involvement of victims and survivors of child sexual abuse remains absolutely core to us at the CSA Centre, and we remain hugely grateful to the many people with lived experience of abuse who gave their time to advise on our work throughout 2025. But we remain deeply concerned by the challenges facing support services for victims and survivors. In 2025, we published our latest survey of support services, with the worrying finding that 23 services had closed in the 18 months since our last survey, and many more facing funding uncertainty.
We’ve tried to help where we can, offering a programme of free training webinars for the voluntary sector and running two new child sexual abuse practice leads programmes for service providers, one aimed specifically at services run by and for people from racialised heritages. And on another hugely exciting project, which we hope to say much more about in 2026, we’ve been working with linguistic experts and community groups to translate key words and phrases about child sexual abuse into three languages (Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu) that currently lack the words to articulate these experiences.
Later in the year, we’ll be publishing a new framework of interventions for adult survivors of child sexual abuse. We’ll also be launching a new hub of self-help resources for victims and survivors, aiming to make the many brilliant and freely available resources more easily accessible to those who need them. We’ve been focusing on the needs of parents and carers of sexually abused children too, building on our existing parents and carers guidance by undertaking new research on the support needs of this too often neglected group, and producing a guide to existing interventions, all of which will be published this year.
Shaping the national conversation
We continue to work with partners across government on the response to the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), Baroness Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, and the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s report on child sexual abuse in the family environment. In Wales, we’ve been delighted to see the emergence of a new ten year National strategy for preventing and responding to child sexual abuse in Wales, and our Wales Adviser has been central in the shaping of that strategy with the needs of victims and survivors firmly at the forefront.
With this past year quite starkly showing how quickly misinformation and dangerous narratives can spread, it’s important to be clear on what we know about child sexual abuse, the people it affects and the people who perpetrate it. So, we’ve tried to broaden these discussions out beyond just those of us working with child sexual abuse every day, producing a new overview of the ten things that everyone should know and understand about child sexual abuse, which was followed up with a tailored version specifically for police professionals. In this same spirit, our recently published Key Messages from Research on Child Sexual Exploitation shines a light on what research and evidence does, and doesn’t, tell us about this misunderstood form of sexual abuse.
Planning for the year ahead
We know that the response to child sexual abuse still isn’t where we want it to be, and the number of children identified and supported is still far too low – our annual trends report found that the number of child protection plans for sexual abuse fell to its lowest level for 30 years in 2023/24, and the number of social work assessments identifying concerns of sexual abuse were at their lowest level in 9 years. Our Data Insights Hub has just been refreshed with the latest data for every local authority and police force in England, and is an excellent source for anyone looking to understand the situation in their own area.
The stakes have never been higher and we therefore approach 2026 with even greater determination to drive further change in the fight against child sexual abuse, doing everything we can to protect children and young people from harm, alongside our partners. Our dedicated team engages directly with so many practitioners and service providers, and sees first-hand the passion, enthusiasm and skill with which they approach their work.
With consistent access to training, guidance and support, and crucially with the right systems, funding and leadership in place to support them, professionals can and will make the difference that children and families need – and the CSA Centre will continue to help in any way we can.
Ian Dean
