What Boards and Funders Must Understand About Exploitation and Coercive Offending

Exploitation and coercive offending are not abstract concepts. They are lived realities for children who are groomed, threatened, controlled, and harmed—often while services remain formally “involved”. For Boards and funders, however, these harms are frequently encountered only through reports, dashboards, and performance summaries that smooth complexity and distance decision-makers from lived experience. 

Exploitation is not a single event, and coercive offending is not a one-off poor decision. Both are structural harms that develop over time through grooming, fear, obligation, emotional manipulation, surveillance, and violence. Children affected by exploitation are rarely free to disengage or comply with professional expectations. What may appear as “non-engagement”, "risk-taking", or “criminal behaviour” is often a rational survival response to coercive control. 

Most governance and funding frameworks prioritise measurable activity: numbers supported, sessions delivered, assessments completed, arrests made, or disruptions achieved. While accountability matters, these metrics rarely capture whether exploitation has reduced or coercive control has been interrupted. 

As a result, services can appear successful while children remain exposed to harm—or are drawn deeper into the criminal justice system. 

Boards should be asking: 

What has tangibly changed in the child’s safety? 

Who has been disrupted—the child or the perpetrator? 

Where has criminalisation increased despite known exploitation? 

If these questions are absent, coercive offending becomes invisible within otherwise “effective” systems.

 Adultification is not confined to frontline practice. It also operates at board and funding levels, where children affected by exploitation may be framed as “entrenched”, "streetwise", "high-risk", or “making poor choices".

These narratives subtly shift responsibility away from adults, systems, and perpetrators and onto children themselves. The work of Dr Jahnine Davis has repeatedly highlighted how adultification undermines safeguarding by treating children as more responsible and less deserving of protection. 

Boards and funders must be alert to how their language, thresholds, and outcome expectations may unintentionally reinforce this dynamic. 

At the governance level, risk is often understood primarily in organisational terms: compliance, inspection outcomes, reputation, and financial exposure. While these concerns are real, they must not eclipse the risks faced by children experiencing exploitation. 

When safeguarding is shaped by organisational defensibility, services become cautious and procedural. Early intervention is delayed. Challenge is avoided. Responsibility is deflected. 

Boards have a duty to ensure that the risk to the child, not just organisational risk, sits at the centre of strategic decision-making. 

Smaller, specialist organisations often hold the deepest understanding of exploitation and coercive offending because they work relationally and outside rigid statutory constraints. Yet they are frequently required to conform to governance frameworks that dilute their impact or misrepresent their work. Every funding decision, reporting requirement, and strategic priority sends a message about what matters. Boards and funders cannot be neutral observers of exploitation and coercive offending—they shape how systems respond, what is tolerated, and who is protected. 

Children affected by exploitation do not need systems that look effective. They need systems that are protective.

Written by: Sherry Peck