Exploited, Coerced — and Prosecuted: Why Children Deserve Better

At Ending Coercive Offending, our vision is simple: children should not be criminalised for harm done to them. 

Our current focus is on children who are exploited or coerced into violence, county lines, and drug supply. These are not children exercising free choice. They are children whose lives are shaped by coercion, fear, poverty, trauma, and adult criminal control. 

We believe this is a children’s rights issue hiding in plain sight — and one that continues to be ignored. 

Criminalisation causes harm — and increases future offending 

The evidence is clear and long-standing: early criminalisation does not protect children or communities. It creates stigma, disrupts education, and limits future opportunity. Worse still, it actively increases the likelihood of further justice system involvement. 

The Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime — a major longitudinal study — found that formal criminal justice processing is not neutral. Children who are criminalised early are more likely to continue offending later. In other words, early criminalisation is criminogenic. 

This argument has been articulated powerfully for years. Penelope Gibbs’ 2019 analysis for Transform Justice set out the risks of assessing and managing “risk” through punitive responses. What is striking is not the argument — but the fact that five years later, almost nothing has changed. 

A Campbell Collaboration systematic review reached the same conclusion: justice system intervention for children is associated with worse outcomes, not better ones. Even the College of Policing’s own evidence acknowledges that custodial sanctions are linked to increased reoffending. 

The data shows punitive responses are failing 

The most recent Youth Justice Statistics (2024–25) underline this failure. While the overall proven reoffending rate for children has dipped slightly to 31.8%, the frequency of reoffending is now at a ten-year high — around 4.44 reoffences per child who reoffends. 

This tells us something important: those who remain in the system are cycling through it more intensely. Punitive responses are not breaking patterns of harm — they are entrenching them. 

The children most criminalised are those most in need of protection 

Perhaps most troubling is who is being criminalised. 

Evidence from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner shows that 52% of children in care have a criminal conviction by age 24, compared to just 13% of children not in care. These figures reflect not greater criminality, but deeper unmet safeguarding needs. 

Office for National Statistics data reveals stark racial disparities. Black and Mixed-heritage children in care experience higher rates of imprisonment than their White or Asian peers. White children in care are significantly more likely to receive cautions or non-custodial outcomes — highlighting unequal responses within the system. 

Recent research by Leyland, Webb, Hughes and Bennett further confirms that children in out-of-home care have a greater likelihood of criminal justice contact than their peers, with the impact compounded for girls. 

Put simply: the children most in need of protection are the most likely to be punished. 

The case for change is urgent, yet we continue to fund, justify, and defend systems that cause harm — despite decades of evidence. 

Ending the criminalisation of exploited and coerced children is not a radical idea. It is a necessary correction — one that would reduce harm, interrupt cycles of offending, and better align the justice system with children’s rights. 

The question is no longer whether change is justified. 
The question is why we are still waiting.