A Landmark Decision – Now Apply the Same Lens to Child Criminal Exploitation
This week, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) reached a landmark decision.
The convictions of a woman who, as a child, had been groomed and sexually exploited were quashed after the CCRC concluded that the failures of public authorities to identify and protect her meant she had been unable to participate effectively in the criminal proceedings against her.
This is an extraordinary and welcome recognition of something many of us working with exploited children have known for years. Children cannot be understood separately from the circumstances in which they are trapped. When adults exploit children, and systems fail to recognise that exploitation, those same systems frequently go on to criminalise the child's survival. At Ending Coercive Offending, we wholeheartedly welcome this judgment.
It represents more than the correction of one miscarriage of justice. It signals a growing willingness to acknowledge that exploitation fundamentally changes how we should understand children's actions. But now comes the difficult question.
If this principle is right for children groomed for sexual exploitation, why should it not also apply to children groomed for criminal exploitation?
Every day, children are coerced into transporting drugs, carrying weapons, storing cash, committing robberies, cultivating cannabis, stealing vehicles, or committing violence on behalf of adults. Many have experienced threats, intimidation, debt bondage, violence against themselves or their families, trauma, neglect and profound manipulation.
Yet too often the criminal justice system has focused on what they did, rather than asking why they did it. We have become accustomed to seeing the offence while overlooking the coercion.
This decision challenges that way of thinking.
It asks us to recognise that where exploitation fundamentally undermines a child's ability to make free choices, or where the state has failed to identify and protect that child, the legitimacy of subsequent criminal proceedings deserves careful scrutiny.
That principle should not depend upon the form exploitation takes. Whether the child is exploited sexually or criminally, the underlying questions remain remarkably similar.
Who held the power?
Who exercised coercion?
What choices did the child realistically have?
What opportunities did professionals miss to recognise what was happening?
And should the child ever have been standing in the dock in the first place?
For years, practitioners have watched children move through police custody, youth justice and the courts carrying labels such as "gang member", "drug dealer", "violent offender" or "persistent offender", when a fuller understanding reveals children surviving impossible circumstances created by adults.
Those convictions do not simply punish children. They shape education, employment, housing, relationships and life opportunities for decades afterwards. If we are serious about recognising exploitation, then our response cannot stop at better safeguarding today. We must also be willing to revisit the decisions made yesterday.
This landmark CCRC decision opens an important door.
Our hope is that the same principles are now applied to children whose offending arose through criminal exploitation. Justice should never depend upon the type of exploitation a child endured. A child coerced into offending deserves the same careful examination of their case as a child coerced into sexual exploitation.
That is not lowering accountability. It is finally recognising where accountability truly belongs.
At Ending Coercive Offending, we believe this should mark the beginning of a much wider conversation about historic convictions involving exploited children.
It is time to look again.
Not through the lens of offending.
But through the lens of coercion.
Written by: ECO