Collette Kalsi, Emily Ellison, Ruth Austin
Young People's Harmful Sexual Behaviour, A New Way of Conceptualising This, and Supporting Them
Workshop Abstract
Shore Plus has been designed to meet the needs of a cohort that often falls between the remit of other services; young people who are concerned about their harmful sexual thoughts about younger children, or those who are engaging in harmful sexual behaviour online; and who importantly are not known to other professional agencies.
There is a significant barrier to help seeking for young people who are concerned about legal and social repercussions; the Lucy Faithfull Foundation have drawn upon their experience working anonymously, and delivering psychoeducational programmes to create a new service that bridges this gap; providing anonymous, accessible, and supported programmes via an online portal.
In the first half of the workshop, we will introduce the service and provide demonstrations of the Shore Plus portal. The workshop will demonstrate the benefits of collaborative work with young people in designing services for them, illustrating some of the methods and challenges faced.
In the second half of the workshop, attendees will be given the opportunity to learn some preliminary findings of the evaluation of the Shore Plus programme. Shore Plus is a unique service, offering relationship-based support to young people on an anonymous basis.
The evaluation focuses on young people’s experiences of the programme and whether it meets its intended aims of providing knowledge and information to enable young people to change their harmful sexual thoughts and/or behaviour. We will welcome NOTA attendees to share their thoughts on the service and its evaluation.
We expect that our learning from the design, implementation and evaluation of Shore Plus will contribute to the wider knowledge and practices in this area and have important implications for service development across the sector.
About the Speakers
Collette Kalsi is a senior practitioner within the young people’s team at the Lucy Faithfull Foundation. She delivers specialist assessments and interventions for children, young people and families relating to problematic or harmful sexual behaviour.
She is the lead practitioner for the Shore service and a leader in the design of Shore Plus. Prior to working at LFF, Ms Kalsi had 10 years of experience as a social worker, providing frontline support to young people and their families. Subsequently, from 2008, Ms Kalsi worked for the NSPCC in the specialist Harmful Sexual Behaviour team.
Emily Ellison is a Trainee Forensic Psychologist at the Lucy Faithfull Foundation. She conducts expert interventions for adults and young people relating toharmful sexual behaviour and the prevention of child sexual abuse. Ms Ellison was instrumental in the launch of Shore and led the pilot evaluation of the service.
Ms Ellison has since taken a lead role in theevaluation of Shore Plus. Previously, Ms Ellison contributed to the design and pilot evaluation of acourt preparatory tool for children who provided forensic testimony in reference to child sexual abuse,receiving the Crystal Scales of Justice for outstanding innovation.
Ruth Austin is a Post Graduate Researcher in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. Previous research areas include CSA in Children’s homes in England and Wales and CSA within religious institutions.
With an increasing rise in ‘self-generated’ online CSAMs, Ruth is examining children and young people’s ‘risky’ behaviours in online spaces as part of fully funded PhD. The aim of which is to produce evidence informed safeguarding policy.