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.

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 research about looked after children and sexual abuse.

Our ‘Key messages from research’ papers bring together the most up-to-date research into a succinct and accessible overview for frontline practitioners and commissioners of services. This paper focuses on how children tell others about their experience of sexual abuse, the barriers to telling, and supportive actions that practitioners can take.

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.

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.