4.6 Risk Outside the Home

Risk Outside the Home

Working Together to Safeguard Children recognises that, as well as threats to the welfare of children from within their families, children may be vulnerable to abuse or exploitation from outside their families.

These extra-familial threats might arise at school and other educational establishments, from within peer groups, or more widely from within the wider community and/or online.

These threats can take a variety of different forms and children can be vulnerable to multiple threats, including:

• sexual abuse (including harassment and exploitation),
• domestic abuse in their own intimate relationships (teenage relationship abuse),
• exploitation by criminal gangs and organised crime groups such as serious youth violence and county lines,
• trafficking,
• online abuse,
• sexual exploitation,
• influences of extremism leading to radicalisation.