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Complex Safeguarding Wales

Safeguarding responsibilities for police

Adopting a child-first approach can be used to alleviate a young person’s fear of arrest.

As an emergency service, the police are often called upon when young people are in crisis outside office hours and when other services are closed. Yet, exploiters will have told young people to fear the police. They may have been threatened with what will happen to them if they are caught by the police.

All police officers must be alert to child criminal exploitation, its different models, and the range of perpetrators and criminal activities young people are coerced into committing. This includes going beyond the visible evidence.

Complex Safeguarding calls for professional curiosity and asking yourself:

  • why is the young person is in this location?
  • why do they have so much cash on them while they are starving and dirty?
  • how did they afford these drugs?

Police officers should also consider previous missing episodes and contact with the police as this may reveal a picture or pattern that suggests the young person is being criminally exploited.

Increased risk

Any contact with the police may result in repercussions for the young person and their families. Where drugs or money are confiscated, young people are placed in debt bondage to the exploiter. If the young person does not repay this debt they can be subjected to kidnapping, sexual violence, and torture.

Young people may allude to their fear or their concerns about the safety of family members. They may be frightened of parental responses and getting into trouble.

Multi-agency approaches are paramount to safeguarding the young person. Police officers must understand the service pathways for child criminal exploitation, modern slavery, trafficking and child sexual exploitation when referring young people to other agencies.

Police officers must contribute to multi-agency discussions and meetings. They should give and receive intelligence that can be used at the individual level to safeguard young people, and at the community level to identify patterns and trends to target those higher up the criminal exploitation chain.