Publications & Resources

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.

Our ‘Key messages from research’ papers aim to provide succinct, relevant information for frontline practitioners and commissioners. They bring together the most up-to-date research into an accessible overview, supporting confident provision of the best possible responses to child sexual abuse. This paper focuses on child sexual abuse within institutions or organisations and was updated in 2023 (see second edition, renamed as 'Key messages from research on child sexual abuse in institutional contexts).

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.

Our ‘Key messages from research’ papers aim to provide succinct, relevant information for frontline practitioners and commissioners. They bring together the most up-to-date research into an accessible overview, supporting confident provision of the best possible responses to child sexual abuse. This paper focuses on children and young people who display harmful sexual behaviour and was updated in 2023 (see second edition).

Our ‘Key messages from research’ papers aim to provide succinct, relevant information for frontline practitioners and commissioners. They bring together the most up-to-date research into an accessible overview, supporting confident provision of the best possible responses to child sexual abuse. This paper was updated in 2023.

This review by the Connect Centre for International Research on Interpersonal Violence, commissioned by the CSA Centre, was produced to inform its work on improving data currently collected in England and Wales. This study looks at differences in self-report survey methodologies to research rates of victimisation and perpetration.

This briefing reflects on the learning from a series of five scoping studies commissioned by the CSA Centre concerning perpetrators of child sexual exploitation, and sets out how the CSA Centre’s next steps will build on this work.

The first report in the Child sexual exploitation perpetrators research programme. This report investigates the backgrounds of young people identified for child sexual exploitation concerns as perpetrators, the nature and range of their sexual behaviours, and the range of victims targeted. It was written by Simon Hackett, Durham University, and Stephen Smith, Durham Constabulary.

The second report in the Child sexual exploitation perpetrators research programme. The report investigates the characteristics of those who commit child sexual abuse and identify the nature and dynamics of their behaviours, their motivations and the way they target and exploit their victims.