# Transcript

Most young people that are referred to us all have a diagnosis of autism, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, they have mental health difficulties, attachment issues and trauma based behaviours. A lot of the young people I have worked with have had a lot of traumatic early years experience in education. They’ve been excluded on numerous times and been to different mainstream settings and in and out of education for maybe four or five years. Some of the young people have also been home educated for long periods of time. A lot of the young people that we look after are on care orders so they could be fostered, adopted or under special guardianship order.

The challenges that I face every day with working with this specific group of children on the internet is that they have difficulties with their social interactions with peers and they find it hard to form appropriate relationships and sustain them. Our young people are also desperate to have friends and they will put themselves in vulnerable positions to form relationships; i.e. sending inappropriate pictures or talking to strangers or sending explicit texts. They also end up having arguments over the internet which causes conflict in the setting, young people not always recognising the dangers of the internet and the risks that they put themselves under. Also they can, like, grooming or watching harmful material, pornography and they also can access, like, self harm videos in order to hurt themselves.

I’ve seen child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation, online sexual abuse. Radicalisation which is where you are groomed to be involved in terrorism.

Online gambling, now this is quite a recent one that I’ve been involved with, where a young person actually stole the credit card – parent’s credit card and is quite fixed actually and got a, like, an addiction to it and has spent thousands of pounds on mum’s credit card.

So the specific group of children that I work for all have experienced some significant trauma or event and this has had such a huge impact on their emotional and social needs, therefore leaving them completely vulnerable to online grooming. They are so desperate to make friends and this can look very obsessive to us because they haven’t got the social skills.

Young people may display risky behaviours online, particularly on the chatrooms like Facebook, Whatsapp. They may feel more confident in talking to strangers than they do to their own friends or family. They share their personal information including names, addresses, phone numbers, where they live and what school they go to and they don’t actually realise that the person on the other end could be an abuser. Young people may exchange self sexual images or videos through mobile phones or other devices, Facebook being top of the list for this. These images can be shared to other members of the group and also they don’t realise that once they’ve put this picture up it’s there for good.