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Be Safe

Checked: 18-04-2024 by Vicky Ryan Next Review: 17-04-2026

Overview

Be Safe is a small multi-disciplinary team that works with children and young people who have engaged in problematic (PSB) or harmful sexual behaviour (HSB), their parents/carers and those supporting them.

Children and young people who display harmful sexual behaviour often need help themselves and may have experienced harm themselves. Be Safe is part of Specialist CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service), and offers direct assessment and therapeutic intervention (‘treatment’) services to children, young people and their families, as well as advice, training and consultation to a broad range of professionals.

The Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust (AWP) website provides full details of the service offered and contains up to date leaflets, referral forms and other documents.

Be Safe is available in Bristol & South Gloucestershire

Be Safe offer services to children and young people who have displayed problematic or harmful sexual behaviour who are:

in Bristol, aged 4 – 17 years
in South Gloucestershire, aged 7 – 11 years
on a commissioned basis from these areas and other localities (fees, where applicable, are available on request and through the website)

For the child or young person to access services:

they must have an allocated Children’s Social Care (CSC) Worker or Early Help worker who remains allocated throughout Be Safe’s involvement, unless agreed with the Be Safe Clinical Team Manager or other senior clinician.
the problematic or harmful sexual behaviour must have been investigated by CSC and/or the police, and any safeguarding concerns must be being addressed and police investigations or prosecution finished. Any exceptions to this must be agreed with the Be Safe Clinical Team Manager or other senior clinician.

Referral

A child or young person can be referred by any professional working with them, but consent is needed from the child/young person’s parent/carer and child/ young person if they have the capacity to understand and agree.

The service encourage you to discuss your concerns with Be Safe before completing the referral form. Please contact the Be Safe team on: 0117 3408700 or via the team’s email on: awp.besafe@nhs.net and someone will get back to you.

The referral form is available on the AWP website: Be Safe service :: Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust (awp.nhs.uk)

Efforts are made to ensure the accuracy and agreement of these guidelines, including any content uploaded, referred to or linked to from the system. However, BNSSG ICB cannot guarantee this. This guidance does not override the individual responsibility of healthcare professionals to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual patient, in consultation with the patient and/or guardian or carer, in accordance with the mental capacity act, and informed by the summary of product characteristics of any drugs they are considering. Practitioners are required to perform their duties in accordance with the law and their regulators and nothing in this guidance should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with compliance with those duties.

Information provided through Remedy is continually updated so please be aware any printed copies may quickly become out of date.