South Yorkshire police officers urged to be extra vigilant in rooting out child abuse due to schools being closed

Assistant chief constable Tim Forber said child abuse was a ‘hidden crime’ and is often first picked up from inside schools by staff.

He told a recent police and crime commissioner meeting that officers were being asked to show more ‘professional curiosity’ in trying to uncover child abuse in the community during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Mr Forber said the force had ‘reinforced’ training for officers in looking for signs of vulnerability in children and said staff would come across more vulnerable children in their adopted lockdown roles than they would at any other time through call-outs to domestic incidents.

He said: “Child abuse is often picked up in places of education and clearly at the moment, this is not happening in schools.

“It’s very much a hidden crime and what we have one is to be very clear with our officers that they are likely to come into contact with a higher proportion of vulnerable children than they would otherwise do.

“We’ve reinforced our training looking for the signs of vulnerability - we call it professional curiosity.

“Officers will get called to domestic settings over a whole range of issues and that could be unrelated crime or in home crime or Covid-19 related issues.

“What we’ve sought to do is to reinforce that professional curiosity to be looking for signs that something isn’t right.

“If you look at our totality of child abuse reports, are far higher proportion of those from lockdown will come from internal settings through officers rather than third party professional reports.

“It is a concern and remains a concern for the force that absence of children in schools means that some of these crimes are not picked up outside of lockdown.”

Dr Alan Billings, South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner, said: “It's clearly an anxiety with the schools being closed as to what’s happening to the children and it’s something that schools would pick up on so I’m glad to hear about the police’s response to this.”