The paper titled, What do we mean by “child criminal exploitation”? The need for a clear rights-based legal definition, exploring existing definitions of child criminal exploitation, and how a legal definition should be introduced with children’s rights at the heart of it is aimed at helping inform the new government in deciding how to clarify the law to protect children from criminal exploitation.
Why does Child Criminal Exploitation need a statutory footing?
An illustration for this need is child sexual exploitation which has a legal definition and as a result a national Child Sexual Abuse Strategy which tackles child sexual exploitation. This has made a significant difference to professionals’ effectiveness in identifying and supporting sexually exploited children. Because there is no legal definition of child criminal exploitation, it is not consistently identified by different partners across the country. Too many children are dealt with as offenders rather than victims, suffering consequences that can have long-term implications for their life trajectory.
Background
In 2015 Catch22 was commissioned to provide specialist support to child victims of sexual exploitation in Merseyside. In 2019 it grew and became the Pan-Merseyside Child Exploitation service – to recognise the crossover between child criminal exploitation and child sexual exploitation, and train caseworkers to provide support to victims of any form of child exploitation.
Vikki McKenna, Service Manager for the Pan-Merseyside service explains why:
“A decade ago, Catch22 began raising the issue of the criminal exploitation of children with whom our Merseyside Missing and child sexual exploitation service were working. Eventually, after sharing data and case studies, and pressing the case for child criminal exploitation support, local commissioners agreed to expand the Catch22 service into what we believe was the first service in the country to accept referrals for children affected by all forms of child exploitation. It was the first of many Catch22 services to do so.”
At the same time, we realised through having multiple services across the country, there was no coordinated understanding or approach by authorities and partners in responding to the issue. The Child Sexual Abuse strategy was published in 2021 and made significant progress in improving the protection of child victims of sexual exploitation, however, no equivalent strategy was published for child victims of criminal exploitation.
This led us to call for a National Child Exploitation Strategy in 2021 that would update statutory guidance for professionals to bring together all forms of child exploitation and include a legal definition of child criminal exploitation.
Sarah Parker, Research and Development Officer at Catch22, reflects on the progress policymakers have made concerning child exploitation, and how protection for different forms of child exploitation compares:
“At times, it has felt like going back to the bad old days at the beginning of the century, where professionals did not always identify sexual exploitation. Children victimised through criminal exploitation can be further victimised through the systems that should be supporting them- through school exclusion, lack of specialist mental health support or even criminalisation.”
At the Labour Party’s Manifesto launch in June, the party committed to introducing “a new law on the exploitation of children and young people by criminal gangs, including county lines, creating a new criminal offence of child criminal exploitation”, alongside developing a new ‘serious organised crime strategy’. Now that Labour is in government, we look forward to hearing the details of the plan to make this a reality.
About the author
Clara Paul is the author of this research and is currently undertaking a PhD in Criminology at Keele University (transferring to the University of Manchester in October 2024), aimed at understanding children’s experiences and perceptions of “child criminal exploitation”. Clara will start work with children who have been referred to Catch22 for support in the coming year to ask about their insights, experiences and opinions.