Attrition in cases involving crimes of child sexual exploitation in England

This thesis is a critical exposition of attrition in cases involving crimes of child sexual exploitation in England. More specifically, this thesis offers an analysis of policy texts and empirical data, to interrogate the conditions of possibility for attrition in contemporary discourses on child sexual exploitation. It does so by employing a Foucauldian feminist theoretical framework and critical discourse analysis. It shows that knowledge statements within child sexual exploitation discourses around the notion of risk, about children as (un)knowing and as (a)sexual coupled with techniques of power such as the processes of assessing risk, the deployment of the rhetoric of consent and the requirement for an avowing subject, construct multiple subject positions which sexually exploited children come to occupy. It contends that specific rationalities underpinning the current forms of thinking within practitioners' discourse about the problem of attrition in child sexual exploitation cases in conjunction with the deployment within policy discourse of specific strategies for tackling crimes of child sexual exploitation, such as the disruption of perpetrators, lead to the de-prioritisation of prosecutions as a rational response to the crimes of child sexual exploitation. It stresses that children's experiences of sexual exploitation emerge into a discursive space enclosed by three axes namely: the fields of knowledge, processes of normalisation, and the modes of subject formation. It contends that these three axes enclosing the child sexual exploitation discursive space intersect at various sites within child sexual exploitation practice thereby producing the conditions in which attrition in these cases becomes possible.