An exciting new project with The Maggie Oliver Foundation

AM Services Group launches child sexual exploitation awareness training with The Maggie Oliver Foundation

We’re delighted to announce that we recently partnered with the Maggie Oliver Foundation, the charity that campaigns to transform pain into power and help survivors of abuse move on with their lives, in an exciting new project.

Research shows that many young people feel unsafe in public spaces and do not know where to turn for help, alongside adults feeling unable to identify young people at risk from sexual exploitation. AM Services Group has a strong portfolio of retail clients across the North of England and provides key cleaning and security services to a number of large shopping centres and town centres. We therefore felt ideally placed to help support the safety of young people in some of these spaces.

Maggie Oliver, who is best known as the detective-turned-whistleblower in the 2012 Rochdale grooming case, now with a fierce determination to make a real difference in the lives of survivors of childhood sexual abuse by highlighting the problems and mishandling of cases on a national scale, joined forces with our Operations Director Neil Cooper to put together a child sexual exploitation awareness training course.

Delivered by Maggie and her operations manager, and attended by key AM Services Group staff, our first training centred around discussion and sharing of information and experiences, with ideas that can be taken forward with clients to improve: 

• awareness of settings where a child may be at risk of exploitation
• spotting the characteristics of child sexual exploitation offenders
• actions that could be taken in possible child protection situations
• how to report to, and work with, the relevant agencies and authorities
• deterrence of potential offenders

Maggie commented: “This is a fantastic opportunity to share our experience and knowledge with the people at the coalface. Working with AM Services Group, we want to help to prevent abuse in local communities and to strengthen early intervention. If something you see doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t and we want to give adults the confidence to act upon this.”

Neil added: “We have learned from Maggie that acting in the right way and acting early in a child sexual exploitation situation can potentially alter an extremely negative course for a young person. One of our company values is everyone matters, which states that everyone is heard and respected and we always act with integrity, so this project sits very comfortably with us. Our security teams’ work revolves around excellent relationships and communications with clients, retail tenants and the local police and authorities and we hope, through projects such as this, that we can make a real difference in supporting vulnerable young people.”