B-BRIDGE
Ministry of Justice
B-BRIDGE is an NGO that offers schools and professionals the resources and platforms to help assess students and young people in relation to the grey areas in social and sexual exploitation.
Project partner with Ministry of Justice, within the brief “how the can help professionals spot even the subtlest sign of CSE and take action.”
Research
This project is about focusing on how can we help professional detect the subtle signs and taking action, project supported by Ministry of Justice.
What we've noticed that there is an excessive focus on the system on prosecution, and that focus creates that victims don’t speak out or access mainstream support services, instead we learn that they seek support from trusted community organizations.
The current policy interventions,There is a huge gap in the development of support interventions before the formal report to the police.
On September of 2018 the Secretary of State for Justice stated that: If victims feel supported, understood, and protected they will report. Given this our goal is to -Improve Support mechanism to encourage early informal report that can connect them to relevant support structures, changing the focus from Formal Report to Informal Report.
We have learn the sign of CSE are behavioural so in order to spot then people have to have a relationships with the minor, and even in this situation this could take a lot of time. Therefore our focus is helping professional trigger conversations and improve their assessment and referral capabilities so minor can report informally and be refer earlier to support mechanism.
What happens today is that Council deliver trigger session that make kids realise what they are living though but the school staff don’t have the capabilities to support the kids after a disclosure. So because of their accountability scare and the lack of protocols for medium lo low risk cases they can do two thing, they focus on building evidence or they refer kids badly to social services. (Medium to low risk of CSE we are referring to cases in which they no evidence of habitual abuse, which acknowledge that is happening anyways.)
Victims today what are not aware of their situation, are afraid of the consequences, don’t know how to access help and don’t understand the value of support. To make their behaviour change, What they need is to understand that they are in an abusive situation,
they need assessment on the routes and consequences of different support structures, and also they need to have someone that can heard them and refer them to external support when they feel ready.
Strategy and Solution
B-Bridge help schools deal with their referral and assessment capabilities through handing resources and platforms to school staffs
by installing a voluntary teams to help them and create drop in centers. It help both school staff and young people by providing information and advice for where to get further support.
And we arrived our main touch points which are -
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website to create awareness sessions
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apps for counseling and information
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and on boarding box with elements that remind people about our service
Values
“B-Bridge would be an early intervention and so it would be a new stage in safe guarding which is necessary and would give teachers as well as students more of a voice.”
-Sally - Art Teacher /Pupil Referral Unit