Working with families

Even when parents are perceived as having the capacity to support their children, child criminal exploitation goes beyond what parents can support alone.

Under the Care and Support (Eligibility) (Wales) Regulations (2015), local authorities should intervene in these cases.

Practitioners should not blame parents.

Parents are often assessed when the risk of harm is outside the family environment, or in the community by older peers or adults. Establishing trusting relationships with parents, and partnership working, will be adversely affected where parents are made to feel they are part of the problem. It may also hinder opportunities for them to obtain help and support.

Parenting techniques

Exploiters take advantage of:

• the challenges of parenting teenagers.
• increased influence of peers.
• service remit, ways of working and thresholds.

Telling parents to enforce boundaries or consequences can be counterproductive. It may push young people toward the exploiters.

Young people are told that the exploiters are their ‘new family’, and that only the exploiters care about them, and want them to do well. When parents challenge young people and try to impose boundaries, it feeds into this narrative, and further disconnects young people from their families.

Children’s Service practitioners should support parents to retain a relationship with their criminally exploited child. This should include the adoption of narratives that run counter to, but do not challenge, exploiter attempts at isolating the young person from their family.