Individual risk factors

Any young person of any age, gender, ethnicity, or background can be criminally exploited.

Exploiters target young people who are vulnerable due to their unmet needs or lack of social capital and social inclusion. Those with multiple unmet needs are at heightened risk.

Practitioners must learn the risk factors that indicate young people who may be at risk of criminal exploitation.

Individual risk factors: the 8As

1. Age

Young people are typically targeted between the ages of 13 and 18, but there has been a shift to children as young as 9.

2. Abuse

Young people may be vulnerable due to emotional, physical, sexual abuse, or neglect.

3. Additional needs

Young people are groomed due to their difficulties in making friends, especially if they have additional learning needs or are neurodiverse. They may be at heightened risk because they struggle socially, are naïve, or have thrill-seeking behaviours.

4. Accommodated

Care-experienced young people, including those placed in hostels, foster care, and unaccompanied asylum seekers, may be befriended due to their need for money, loneliness, or isolation.

5. Authoritarian

Young people who are subjected to rigid controls or loss of liberty either by parents, carers, or the local authority.

6. Alienated

Young people with  low self-esteem or confidence, including those with low social capital.

7. Adaptive

The term ‘ghost young people’ means those who are unknown to services. Young people are more likely to be targeted if they are unlikely to attract attention from professionals.

• Girls: if professionals adopt gendered thinking and only associate boys with child criminal exploitation, criminally exploited girls are less likely to be safeguarded.
• Affluent homes: if professionals only link child criminal exploitation to poverty, the risk to other young people goes unnoticed.
• Excluded from school: these children are prime targets as they have less adult oversight and lots of free time.
• University students: are targeted due to their need for money.

8. Adultification

Young people who are perceived as more mature than their peers, such as Black youth or young people who are looked after.