Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to (a) identify and (b) prevent child sex trafficking.

The trafficking of children for sexual exploitation is a truly horrific crime. This Government has set out an unprecedented mission to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, and we will use all the levers available to us to deliver this. This will include working closely with law enforcement partners, such as the Tackling Organised Exploitation Programme (TOEX), which continues work to develop a whole system approach to improving intelligence, analysis, and tasking to enhance law enforcement response to the exploitation of vulnerable people, including victims of trafficking, sexual exploitation, and abuse.

The following table shows the number of referrals to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM, the framework for identifying and referring potential victims of modern slavery to appropriate support) for (partial or whole) sexual exploitation for children, at age of exploitation.

In addition to the statutory support local authorities provide to victims of modern slavery, for potential child victims, the Government has rolled out the Independent Child Trafficking Guardian (ICTG) service to two thirds of local authorities in England and Wales. The ICTG service is currently delivered by Barnardo's.