Publications & Resources

This briefing summarises the key findings from the Responding to child sexual abuse: Learning from children’s services in Wales full report, and outlines the CSA Centre’s recommendations for changes to local and national policy and practice in response.

A rapid review of the empirical studies describing typologies of child sexual abuse offending and how they were developed. This review focuses on methodology, seeking to identify common limitations of earlier studies and typologies, and how these might be addressed. The findings from the rapid review have been used to inform the CSA Centre's work to develop a new typology of adult offending.

This report presents a new typology of child sexual abuse offending. The new typology of child sexual abuse focuses on the context of offending and drawing out types that reflect different patterns of offending, rather than by focusing on the characteristics of the perpetrator or the victim. The focus of this typology is on offending by adults (18 and over).

The results of the CSA Centre's survey with the aim of building an understanding of the current research landscape related to child sexual abuse and exploitation. The survey was first conducted in 2018 and was repeated in mid-2019, and the findings from both surveys are presented in this report. They provide an insight into the types and forms of research currently being undertaken within the field of child sexual abuse, and the presence of any gaps.

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

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.