Professionals and organisations involved in addressing, preventing and prosecuting Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) will be attending a virtual Hugh James conference in association with NSPCC, which will focus on preventing and responding to CSA during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Alan Collins, Partner at the Top 100 UK law firm and Head of the Hugh James Abuse Team, will open the conference. He will make an introductory speech about some of the shared issues that have been created or re-enforced by the pandemic and set out the objectives for the day.
Member of Parliament for Rotherham and Chair of the International Development Select Committee, Sarah Champion MP is one of our keynote speakers for the day. Sarah is committed to eradicating child abuse and promoting women’s and child rights globally. She will be discussing work that is currently being undertaken by the Parliamentary International Select Committee.
Also on the speaking line-up is Chief Constable of Sussex Police, Jo Shiner. She is also the NPCC lead for children and young people and is a Trustee for the charity Embrace (Child Victims of Crime). Her topic of conversation for the conference is ‘Safeguarding and Protecting our Future Generation’.
Our first guest speakers for the day will be Becky Armstrong-Corbett and John Viney who are part of a core participant group that presented evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). John and Becky will be talking about responding to CSA in a high control religious group.
We will also be joined by Cecile Gwilym who is Policy and Public Affairs Manager for the NSPCC; Professor Jonathan Bisson, a Professor in Psychiatry at Cardiff University; and Professor Michael Salter, a Scientia Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. A key area of discussion from these speakers will be looking at child safety online and the impact that COVID-19 has had on the risk of online child exploitation.
Dr Samantha Clutton, Senior Policy Manager of Children’s Safeguarding for Welsh Government will be joining us in the afternoon, covering the national action plan on preventing and responding to CSA. Samantha has been involved as a leader for change in responding to child sexual exploitation and child poverty in Wales during her career.