The Working Together 2026 guidance improves multi-agency coordination and early intervention but fails to address a critical systemic blind spot: the ongoing criminalisation of exploited children. Despite stronger safeguarding language, it lacks the structural protections and explicit mandates required to prioritise children's rights over prosecution when coercion and exploitation are present.

Instead of focusing on individual "choice," the concept of social entrapment highlights how structural harm, poverty, and systemic failures constrain a child's options. Behaviours often labelled as offending are frequently survival strategies in response to layered pressures and exploitation. ECO advocates for a justice system that moves beyond blame, asking not just "what did the child do?" but "what happened to them?" to ensure responses prioritise welfare, rights, and long-term wellbeing.

Evidence proves that early criminalization is criminogenic, yet systems continue to punish children for their own exploitation. With reoffending frequency at a ten-year high and stark disparities facing children in care—particularly Black and Mixed-heritage children—current punitive responses are failing. ECO argues that criminalization is a children’s rights issue hiding in plain sight. We must stop funding harm and instead align justice with protection, rights, and reality.

When children with insecure immigration status are criminalised for coerced offences, it triggers a "life sentence" of harm. Beyond the courtroom, convictions create systemic barriers like detention and deportation. ECO argues that true violence reduction requires shifting from punitive enforcement to safeguarding that protects a child’s future.

Systems often punish exploited children instead of protecting them. Grounded in Kendra Houseman’s work, ECO argues that criminalisation strips away context, reinforcing trauma and mistrust. By prioritising relationship-based safeguarding over punitive labels, we can move from compliance-driven control toward genuine protection rooted in connection, dignity, and care.

Child criminal exploitation is a leadership test, not just a frontline challenge. Systems often prioritise punishment over protection, reframing coercion as "choice." ECO calls for accountable leadership to transform decision-making, increase data transparency, and ensure safeguarding authority overrides criminal justice momentum to protect children from systemic harm.

Current systems often mistake "protection" for punitive measures, criminalizing children whose behavior stems from trauma and exploitation. At ECO, we argue that belonging—not punishment—is the essential safeguard.

Drawing on research by Luke Billingham and Keir Irwin-Rogers, we explore how structural inequalities strip children of their sense of "mattering," leaving them vulnerable to harm. When we respond with exclusion, we reinforce their marginalization. True safety is built through connection. By prioritizing relational understanding over criminalization, we can ensure every child feels seen, valued, and protected by a genuine sense of belonging.

The mission of Ending Coercive Offending (ECO) is to stop the criminalisation of children forced into illegal acts through exploitation, such as county lines and serious violence. It highlights a systemic imbalance where children are often treated as offenders rather than victims. ECO aims to disrupt this by challenging decision-making frameworks, advocating for rights-based safeguarding, and influencing policy. By emphasising that coercion negates free choice, the blog asserts that protection must always precede punishment to address these fundamental safeguarding failures.

In Weaving a Web of Belonging, Dr Lisa Cherry asks us to “consider the adult a child becomes.” It is a powerful prompt — and one our justice and safeguarding systems too often fail to answer. When children who have been harmed, exploited, and coerced are criminalised, we do not create safety; we create the conditions for further harm. Criminalisation strips behaviour from its context, treating survival as wrongdoing and adaptation as moral failure. ECO’s work is grounded in a simple but urgent truth: responsibility is not the same as punishment, and real accountability can only exist where children are safe, supported, and able to imagine a future. Ending the criminalisation of exploited children is not about ignoring harm — it is about preventing it from being repeated.

For too long, we have accepted a system that finds it easier to criminalise children than to protect them. Children who are groomed, coerced, and controlled into offending are routinely treated not as victims of harm, but as the harm itself. This is not an unintended consequence of safeguarding—it is a profound institutional failure. When exploitation is met with punishment rather than protection, the damage does not end with the abuse; it is compounded by criminal records that shape the rest of a child’s life. Ending Coercive Offending exists to name this harm clearly and to challenge the systems that allow it to continue.