Publications & Resources

This briefing paper brings together key findings from a suite of three studies carried out as part of our ‘Understanding Effectiveness’ programme of research, which built on our previous work in order to, improve understanding of the effectiveness of services responding to child sexual abuse, and suggest how the CSA Centre can further contribute to this.

The knowledge review was undertaken by DMSS Research in partnership with the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, London Metropolitan University, between July and December 2018. The report outlines the current landscape of service provision, identifies core elements of effective practice in the field, and outlines the implications for the feasibility of multi-service evaluation.

This report sets out the findings from an online survey of 50 organisations that were providing specific support to children and young people at risk of or had experienced child sexual abuse, or specifically targeting child sexual abuse, including child sexual exploitation, sometimes alongside wider services. It asked them about the type of services they delivered, the children and young people they worked with, the aspects of service delivery that they considered to be most effective, the challenges they faced and the way they evaluated their services.

This study uses interviews with 10 young people with learning difficulties and a further 10 young people with experience of being in care to learn more about the effectiveness of child sexual abuse support services. All the young people had accessed services, and were recruited by the providers of those services for this research.

This 2019 report summarises the latest available data at the time relating to reports and records of child sexual abuse from local authority children’s services and criminal justice agencies.

This report shows the results of the CSA Centre's 2019 pilot of the child sexual abuse data collection template in four areas, involving four local authority children’s services, four police forces and six voluntary-sector services, to test the value and workability of the template for agencies to collect core data about the nature of child sexual abuse.

This resource focuses on how to design and implement monitoring and evaluation within child sexual abuse services, and provides information on carrying out internal or external evaluation. It contains accessible step-by-step guidance, including worksheets, to enable users to develop their own monitoring and evaluation systems.

Working with Saint Mary's Sexual Assault Referral Centre (St Mary’s SARC) this research explores the value and practicability for agencies to collect core data systematically about the nature of child sexual abuse, the people involved in and affected by it, and associated services. This report extracts and analyses narrative data from almost 1000 case files, using a set of core data fields, to find out about the people who are and are not accessing SARC services.

Between October 2017 and March 2018, The CSA Centre funded 17 providers of child sexual abuse services in England and Wales to improve their capacity to assess and evidence their services’ effectiveness as part of our Evaluation Fund. This report sets out the experiences of the service providers involved in the Evaluation Fund, and may prove valuable in the planning of any similar funding projects in the future.

Updated from the original July 2017 version. This report brings together evidence on the scale and nature of child sexual abuse into one single document using reviews of existing prevalence estimates of child sexual abuse, research on the scale of child sexual exploitation, and the official data on recorded cases – in particular, cases that enter the criminal justice and child protection systems.