Naming the Harm
For a long time, there was a truth I kept trying not to look at too closely. But eventually, it became impossible to ignore. As a society, we find it far too easy to criminalise children.
This realisation didn’t come from a single moment. It emerged slowly, through years of professional experience and through conversations with others who shared the same unease. Again and again, I found myself returning to one simple, troubling question: how did we get to a place where children who are harmed are treated as though they are the harm?
Those conversations between the founders of Ending Coercive Offending (ECO) were grounded in a shared and long-standing belief: children should be safeguarded, not criminalised. That belief is not radical. It should be obvious. Yet the reality we see every day tells a different story.
At ECO, we work with the understanding that children who are groomed, coerced, and controlled into offending are victims. They are responding to exploitation, fear, manipulation, and survival. And yet, too often, the system responds to them not with protection, but with punishment.
They are:
Arrested
Charged
Given criminal records
Left to carry the lifelong consequences of that criminalisation
This is not an unfortunate by-product of an otherwise caring system. It is a profound institutional failure.
When a child is criminalised for actions that arise directly from exploitation, the harm does not end with the exploitation itself. It is compounded. A criminal record can shape the rest of a child’s life — affecting education, employment, housing, immigration status, and their sense of who they are allowed to become.
We need to be clear and honest about what is happening. The criminalisation of exploited children is not protection. It is not safeguarding. It is a form of harm in its own right.
Naming that harm matters. It allows us to stop pretending that better diversion schemes or more sympathetic sentencing alone are enough. It forces us to confront the deeper issue: a system that continues to prioritise criminal justice outcomes over children’s welfare, even when exploitation is known and acknowledged.
ECO exists because we believe this must change. Our focus is not simply on treating criminalised children more kindly within the system but on disrupting the very practices that allow exploited children to be viewed as responsible for their own abuse.
Children deserve safety, care, and the chance to heal — not a criminal record that follows them for life.
If we are serious about safeguarding, then we must be serious about ending the criminalisation of exploited children. And the first step is naming it for what it is: harm.
If you agree with us, please get in touch since we are focused on building a movement that creates real and lasting change.
Written by: Sherry Peck