Protecting children from sale, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse progress, new frontiers and the path forward

NICCY welcomes the report’s focus on an overview of the main developments relating to the mandate and new patterns of sale, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children with a view to developing ideas and recommendations for taking the mandate forward and effectively combatting the phenomenon.

The current fiscal and budgetary allocations for NI, in our opinion, does not lend itself to tackling sexual exploitation of children, and abuse of children as a whole. The NI Executive does not have children’s budgeting processes in place, and despite the existence of legislative frameworks such as the Children’s Services Co-Operation (NI) Act 2015, which enables the pooling of resources and finances, amongst others, for the purposes of the wellbeing of children and young people, this is not apparent within all Departments and relevant authorities.

NICCY has continuously called for children’s budgeting processes to be put in place, alongside other ‘General Measures’ to ensure a children’s rights approach is taken in NI. Annual budget cycles, years of ‘stop-start’ government, NIs financial relationship with the UK Government and regular budget cuts has also had an impact on prioritisation of children and young people’s rights.

The full response can be downloaded at the right-hand side of this page.