Working with young people

Young people are not to blame for being criminally exploited.

Professionals must understand that young people are tricked, deceived, or manipulated by people they believe to be their friends.

Relationship-based approach

Young people should have a lead practitioner, or key worker, who has the capacity to establish rapport and build a relationship with them. The lead practitioner may be a youth worker, youth justice practitioner, or social worker.

Where available, young people should also have access to a peer mentor with lived experience of criminal exploitation.

Peer mentors are often more adept at engaging unwilling or reluctant young people, as they have more credibility, and have insight into how young people may be feeling and the barriers they are facing (Maxwell et al., 2022).

Peer mentors can provide strategies for overcoming these barriers, challenge misconceptions, and serve as role models for recovery (Nixon, 2020).

Every contact counts

Every contact with every practitioner should be used to create a reachable moment that can be used to safeguard young people.

Professionals must be role models for strengths-based, child-centred safeguarding practice, and must understand the importance of engaging young people when they are ready to engage.

Adolescent development

Young people’s brains do not fully develop until their twenties, and so their decisions may not seem logical or rational to practitioners.

When young people are groomed at an early age, and miss substantial amounts of compulsory education, their cognitive age may be far lower than their chronological age.

Following the Mental Capacity Act 2005, this disconnection between the young person’s chronological and cognitive age must be borne in mind. Practitioners must engage with young people in accordance with their cognitive age.

Placing young people under constant surveillance and close monitoring can serve as a push factor, reinforcing the exploiters’ narrative that practitioners do not want what’s best for young people.

Victims as well as perpetrators

Young people may be both a victim and perpetrator of child criminal exploitation.

Young people are deceived into thinking they have made a choice to earn ‘easy money’. The reality is that young people are controlled by the exploiters, they are subjected to physical and sexual abuse, forced to stay in filthy trap houses with little food and surrounded by adult drug addicts.

Their siblings or parents may have been threatened. Some young people may begrudgingly accept this abuse as an unavoidable consequence of easy money while others feel trapped and unable to safely exit from the exploiters.

Practitioners must adopt a child first approach where young people are safeguarded and not criminalised (Welsh Government, 2019).