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Complex Safeguarding Wales

Warning signs for healthcare professionals

Healthcare practitioners need to be alert to the warning signs for child criminal exploitation.

Healthcare practioners may notice warning signs of physical or mental trauma. However, there are a range of additional risk factors that health practitioners should be alert to. These include:

  • lack of information about where they live or go to school
  • lack of local connections
  • not being registered with a GP
  • multiple moves locally, nationally or internationally.

Physical signs

Young people may present with unexplained injuries that could be a sign of violent attacks, such as being beaten with metal implements or being stabbed or slashed in the face. Signs of self-harm in a young person, such as self-inflicted punch injuries, can be a precursor to escalating violence.

Exploiters use phyical violence, otherwise known as ‘taxing’, to control young people who have ‘done wrong’ by marking or injuring them as a lesson to others – for example, having their fingernails ripped out.

Sexual injuries

Sexual abuse or violence can be used as form of control by exploiters. This can include 'plugging', where young people are forced to hide drugs inside their bodies.

Healthcare practicioners should be vigilant that boys may be more reluctant to disclose sexual assaults.

Neglect

A young person presenting as dirty and unkempt could be a sign they are being forced to stay in filthy houses. A young person presenting as being underweight or hungry can be another indication of neglect.

Mental signs

Young people may have been forced to witness or have been victm to violence causing signs of mental trauma.  Healthcare practicioners may notice that young people have a heightened sense of helplessness and that no-one can help them.

Young people may use alcohol or drugs as a coping mechanism with mental trauma. Cannabis can be used as a tool to 'hook' young people, trapping them in the exploitative relationship through what is known as ‘debt bondage’. This makes young people feel that they owe their exploiters money for the cannabis they are encouraged to use. Exploiters add large amounts of interest to these payments so young people cannot escape.