Publications & Resources

Findings from research conducted with Saint Mary's Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) to explore 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 1,000 case files, using a set of core data fields, to find out about the people who are and are not accessing SARC services.

A report aimed at professionals involved in advising and referring children, young people and families, so they can better understand the role and purpose of a medical examination in situations where child sexual abuse has been disclosed or is suspected. In addition to showing how medical examinations can obtain evidence of abuse and provide broader health and wellbeing benefits (by identifying a range of unmet physical and mental health needs), the report reviews the limited evidence on how medical examinations are experienced by victims/survivors of child sexual abuse.

Between October 2017 and March 2018, The CSA Centre funded 17 providers of child sexual abuse services in England and Wales, so they could improve their capacity to assess and evidence their services’ effectiveness. This report sets out the experiences of the service providers involved, offering valuable insights for 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).

An update of the original July 2017 version, this report brings together a wealth of evidence relating to the scale and nature of child sexual abuse into a single document. It reviews prevalence estimates of child sexual abuse, summarises published research into the scale of child sexual exploitation, and analyses the official data on recorded cases of child sexual abuse that have entered 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.