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Child-on-child sexual abuse: how to respond

Learn how to manage reports of child-on-child sexual violence and harassment in your school. Use our risk assessment to help you with your next steps.

Updated
on 27 March 2025See updates
School types: All•School phases: All•Ref: 10745
Contents
  1. Follow your school's safeguarding policy
  2. Respond immediately to concerns and disclosures
  3. Do a risk assessment and manage the report
  4. Support the pupils involved
  5. Work with the parents or carers of the pupils involved
  6. You can take disciplinary action while other investigations are ongoing
  7. Be ready to manage unsubstantiated, unfounded, false or malicious reports

This article covers what to do when a child-on-child sexual abuse concern has been raised. For guidance on how to prevent child-on-child sexual abuse, see our other article.

Follow your school's safeguarding policy

If you're dealing with an allegation of child-on-child sexual abuse, you should follow your school's policy.

The policy should refer to locally agreed multi-agency arrangements put in place by your local safeguarding partners.

Your 3 safeguarding partners are the:

  • Local authority (LA)
  • Integrated care board within the LA area (previously known as the clinical commissioning group) 
  • Chief officer of police within the LA

Use our model child protection and safeguarding policy to help you update your procedures.

Respond immediately to concerns and disclosures

Staff shouldn’t wait for a disclosure

A conversation suggesting a child may have been harmed (this may be a conversation the staff