Child Criminal Exploitation and the Interactional Emergence of Victim Status

Abstract

This article draws on observations and interviews with youth justice practitioners and young people involved in county lines drug dealing to explore the processes by which young people are identified as victims of child criminal exploitation (CCE). The findings reveal that interpersonal interactions between practitioners and young people, specifically young people’s capacity to share information and accept intended acts of care, are vital in producing their status as CCE victims. Yet, a lack of appreciation for young people’s divergent experiences of these interactions can create barriers to their realization. The article concludes by exploring the implications of these processes for contemporary youth justice practice, and by questioning the utility of CCE victim identification as a response to children experiencing harm.

INTRODUCTION

The rise of ‘child criminal exploitation’ (CCE) as a concept in UK policy and practice represents a potential major shift in the conceptualization of some children in conflict with the law, from willing perpetrators of crime to victims of coercion. Despite extensive attention to the ways in which children are conceptualized and categorized within different paradigms of youth justice (Cicourel 1968; Brown 2005; Fionda 2005; Goldson 2007; Gelsthorpe and Lanskey 2016), the construction of children as victims of CCE has received relatively little research attention, although with some notable exceptions (Wroe 2021). Even less work examines the processes by which children are identified as victims of CCE, despite the well-established literature on the social construction of victim status (Quinney 1972; Holstein and Miller 1990; Walklate and Spencer 2016).

This article provides insights into the ways in which the construction of children as victims of CCE unfolds in practice, in the context of the English youth justice system. In doing so, this article demonstrates the central role played by interpersonal interactions in the emergence of victim status for children. Children live particularly interconnected lives, characterized by their degree of dependence on the actions of parents, practitioners and peers (Walklate 1989; Brown 2005; Marshall 2023b). Additionally, relationships between practitioners and young people are a central part of young people’s experiences of the justice system (Drake et al. 2014). As such, an appreciation of the impact of interpersonal interactions on the emergence of children as victims of CCE is understandably important. In exploring the role of interactions in processes of victim identification, this article also addresses a wider gap within victimology wherein there exists a ‘conceptual void that has yet to be filled by an adequate description of the victim as a situated, reflective self in interaction with others’ (Rock 2002: 13).

Drawing on research that examines the social construction of victim status, this article explores how the emergence of the ‘CCE victim’ label is predicated on young people interacting in certain ways with those with the power to attribute victim status. Specifically, interpersonal interactions in terms of: children’s ability to reach out to professionals through the sharing of information, and their capacity to accept intended acts of care, play a vital role in the production of CCE victim status, by demonstrating young people’s conformity to normative expectations of ‘genuine’ victims. This article also examines the challenges that young people experience in participating in these kinds of interactions, and the implications of this for the utility of CCE victim identification as an approach to children in conflict with the law.

VICTIM STATUS, CHILDHOOD AND CCE

Research aligned with the broad tradition of critical victimology recognizes that becoming a victim is dependent on more than simply experiencing harm, it also requires the social recognition of one’s status as a victim (Strobl 2004). Victim status is ‘optional, discretionary, and by no means innately given’ (Quinney 1972: 314), and as a result, victim identities are contingent and subject to ongoing processes of negotiation, with the possibility for redefinition always present (Holstein and Miller 1990; Dunn 2001: 289). With this in mind, critical victimologists have sought to interrogate questions of ‘victim recognition’ that is to say: of who is more or less likely to see themselves recognized as a victim in the context of the criminal justice system and why (Walklate 2007; 2012).

Christie’s (1986) seminal theory of the ‘ideal victim’ laid significant foundations for this work, emphasizing that individuals perceived as weak, blameless and respectable are most able to access victim status. Following Christie’s theory, Dunn and Powell-Williams (2007) and Dunn (2001) explore expectations that ‘genuine’ victims will exhibit limited levels of agency. Additionally, research has highlighted the relationship between perceptions of the ‘social value’ of an individual or social group, and their perceived ‘deservingness’ of victim status. (Stanko 1981; Carrabine et al. 2004; Duggan 2018; Long 2018). This body of work emphasizes the problematic nature of ‘victim’ as a highly exclusionary category, one which places restrictive and often unrealistic expectations on the character of those seeking to be recognized as victims.

Conceptualizations of the ‘ideal victim’ share significant common ground with certain constructions of childhood. The social construction of childhood in Britain is characterized by a persistent ambiguity in which children are conceptualized as both ‘savage’: demonized, threatening to the social order and therefore to be feared, controlled or excluded; and ‘angelic’: innocent, vulnerable and requiring guidance and protection (Fionda 2005; Hendrick 2015). Both the ‘ideal victim’ and the ‘angelic child’ are defined by expectations of vulnerability, innocence and minimal agency.

These contrasting constructions of childhood, and their entanglement with dichotomies of ‘victims’ and ‘offenders’, are mirrored in the competing rationales present within the youth justice system (Brown 2005). In England, the system is often characterized as a complex bricolage including both welfare-orientated and punitive approaches (Gelsthorpe and Lanskey 2016). Within this, certain configurations of youth justice have accelerated the construction of children as culpable and deserving of punishment, while others have slowed this trajectory by positioning children as vulnerable and in need of protection (Case and Bateman 2020: 476). The latter paradigm affords greater conceptual space for the framing of young people as victims, for example of early life trauma and of socioeconomic marginalization.

While the existence of widespread experiences of victimization among children in contact with the youth justice system is well established (Chard 2021), explorations of how, and whether, children are conceptualized as victims, and the impact of this on their trajectories through the system, have been relatively rare (Brown 2005). Such approaches have been restricted in part by a normative social context in which ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ identities are highly dichotomized (Rock 1998), and by the ‘fencing off’ of young people’s victimization as a domestic issue (Brown 2005). However, the introduction of CCE victim identification as a specific element of UK policy and practice provides a clear opportunity to examine the processes by which children in conflict with the law may be conceptualized as victims.

While there is currently no statutory definition of CCE (The Children’s Society 2019), The Home Office (2019: 3) offers the following widely used description:

Child criminal exploitation occurs where an individual or group takes advantage of an imbalance of power to coerce, control, manipulate or deceive a child or young person under the age of 18 into any criminal activity.

Current research and policy sees CCE most commonly associated with the county lines model of drug dealing (Home Office 2019). The county lines model describes individuals travelling out from urban areas, typically across county boundaries, to sell drugs in coastal, rural and market towns (Coomber and Moyle 2018; Spicer 2018). The sale of drugs is coordinated using a dedicated mobile phone line or other form of ‘deal line’ (National Crime Agency 2019: 2).

An in-depth understanding of processes of CCE victim identification matters because being identified as a victim of CCE can, at least in theory, have significant implications for young people’s involvement with, or diversion away from, the justice system. Local police and YOS staff are frequently involved in decisions about whether to refer young people involved in county lines to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) (Home Office 2022). Administered by the Home Office, the NRM is a framework for identifying potential victims of ‘modern slavery’ in England and Wales (Home Office 2020), providing either a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ decision as to an individual’s victim status. A positive decision may influence legal proceedings, supporting a defence under Section 45 of The Modern Slavery Act (2015), which makes provision for the non-punishment of individuals who commit certain criminal offences in contexts of exploitation (Ministry of Justice 2019)—although in practice the successful use of this defence is relatively rare (Stone 2018).

Notwithstanding an NRM decision, young people may also access victim-orientated support administered at the local authority level, at the discretion of local practitioners, drawing on guidance from the Ministry of Justice (2019). This can include: police decisions to divert a young person from arrest, the allocation of a specialist CCE support worker, or referrals to children’s social services. As victim identification has the potential to divert young people away from criminalization and its harmful impact (McAra and McVie 2007), it is important to develop a detailed understanding of how it occurs in practice.

The process of being identified as a victim of CCE is complex, precarious and uncertain. This results from three factors: the challenge of recognizing young people coerced into the commission of offences as victims, when ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ are normatively considered as ‘dichotomized’ (Rock 1998) identities (Ministry of Justice 2019: 5; Shaw and Greenhow 2021); the understandably conflicted relationship that young people involved in county lines have with the label ‘victim’, as a stigmatizing concept that often fails to capture the complexities of their lived experiences of drug dealing (Marshall 2022); and finally, the fact that delays in receiving formal NRM decisions, and a lack of confidence in their quality (Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner 2020; Marshall 2023a), has meant that practitioners at the local level have played a heightened role in assessments of victim status. All of these factors create points of tension that render CCE victim identification a complex and contested process from the beginning, with the assignment of victim status far from guaranteed.

The complexity of CCE victim identification is further compounded by the lack of existing research in this area. Reflecting a wider paucity of research, even within critical victimology, that considers processes of victim identification for criminalized young people, at present we know very little about how processes of CCE victim identification play out in practice. Existing research into county lines and CCE has focussed largely on risk factors for young people’s involvement in drug dealing, including the impact of poverty and austerity (Koch 2019), relative deprivation (Irwin-Rogers 2019) and social exclusion (The Children’s Society 2019). While the emergence of CCE as an issue at the macro-level in media and policy discourse has received some attention (Spicer 2021), considerations of processes of victim identification at the micro-level have been rare.

A little more attention has been paid to victim identification in relation to criminal exploitation that occurs outside the context of county lines drug dealing and/or with adults. Within this small body of research, the role of interpersonal interactions in these processes has not been fully developed. For example, studies of the impact of practitioners’ knowledge of criminal exploitation (Villacampa’s and Torres 2017), perceptions of the importance of victim self-identification (Espeute and Lanskey 2023) and assessments of agency and volition (Sturrock and Holmes 2015; Gearon 2019) all examine the influence of practitioners in relative isolation. Similarly, research with young people, for example The Children’s Society’s (2019) work with children who avoid engaging with the victim label due to fear of violent ramifications, tends not to examine their interactions with practitioners. What is missing is a joined-up approach offering a deeper analysis of the ways in which interactions between young people and practitioners shape the emergence of victim status.

VICTIM IDENTIFICATION AS AN INTERACTIONAL PROCESS

Holstein and Miller’s (1990: 104) work calls for a greater understanding of the ‘interactional dynamics’ that influence the emergence of victim status, examining the ongoing interactional processes through which victim identities are offered, negotiated and produced. Paralleling work that examines the role of practitioners in constructing related labels such as ‘juvenile delinquent’ (Cicourel 1968) or ‘vulnerable young person’ (Brown 2015), research that answers this call has tended to focus on practitioners’ judgements of victims’ adherence to normative expectations. These processes of judgement are a form of interaction in that they involve one person’s assessment of, and reaction to, the behaviour of another. Particularly in terms of its focus on police (Sleath and Bull 2017; O’Neal 2019), prosecutor (Stanko 1981; Dunn 2001); (mock) juror (Ellison and Munro 2009) and bystander (Pugh et al. 2016) perceptions of victims’ ‘blamelessness’ and ‘credibility’, research into violence against women has made a significant contribution in this area.

A separate body of literature examines individuals’ construction and navigation of their own identities as victims through interactions, specifically conversations, with others (Andersson 2008; Tennent 2019). These processes are documented in the sub-field of ‘narrative victimology’. This research explores acts of telling stories as a way of coming to terms with traumatic experiences (Pemberton et al. 2019). Narrative victimology also considers how victims navigate conflicts between their identities as victims and pre-existing senses of self through the construction of narratives (Åkerström et al. 2011; Thunberg and Bruck 2020). This work offers an interactional perspective in that it demonstrates that for victims themselves, victim identity emerges through acts of communication, that are heard and interpreted by an audience.

Despite this progress, several gaps exist in the study of victim identification as an interactional process. Firstly, the research described above tends to focus either only on victims or only on those with the power to attribute victim status rather than combining both groups’ experiences of interacting with each other and exploring these experiences in relation. This is despite existing evidence of disconnects between how incidents of harm are labelled and ‘how victims identify themselves’ (Fohring 2018: 151), which indicate that potential victims and those with the power to attribute victim status may have different perceptions and experiences of their interactions with each other.

Secondly, while these studies highlight the importance of interactions for the production of victim status, they do not explore the nature of the specific kinds of interpersonal interactions that produce victim status in sufficient detail. As such, while the ‘conceptual void’ (Rock 2002) regarding the study of interactions within victimology is perhaps not as deep as it once was, it is still very much in existence.

This article focusses on interactions between young people and the police, who had significant power in determining whether young people were criminalized or diverted from the system and treated primarily as victims. This article also focusses on interactions between young people and youth offending workers as, at present, many young people are only identified as potential CCE victims after they have been placed under YOS supervision (The Children’s Society 2019). As a result, although they did not possess the same police powers, YOS staff played a significant role in influencing processes of victim identification.

METHODS

To explore the interactional emergence of CCE victim status, this article draws on semi-structured interviews with 50 youth justice practitioners and 17 young people, based in one English county. The youth justice practitioners all had experience of working with young people for whom there were concerns about their risk of harm from CCE. Practitioners included youth offending team staff (30) police officers, including members of a specialist CCE-focussed police team (12), and CCE support workers (8). CCE support workers provided mentoring and youth work services to young people on a voluntary basis and were based within the YOS.

At times, differing organizational cultures within the YOS and the police added a further layer of complexity to this study. Police were adapting to practices of CCE victim identification, which they described as conflicting with established ideas about the role and purpose of policing (see Farrell et al. 2015). In contrast, the ‘everyday ontologies’ (Smith and Gray 2019: 564) of the YOS provided more scope for the recognition of young people as victims, although this was competing with a persistent focus on risk and responsibilization (Case 2021; Day 2023).

The young people were aged between 14 and 18, with an average age of 16, and had all been assessed by the YOS as being potentially at risk of harm from CCE as a result of their involvement in county lines drug dealing. The majority (16) of the young people were male and one was female. Ten were White British, five were White Eastern European, one was Romani and Eastern European and one was Black African/Asian and British.

In addition, this research involved over 100 hours of observations over the course of 18 months of a variety of YOS and wider council activities relating to CCE including supervisions, referral meetings, risk meetings and educational workshops. An additional 15 young people participated in these activities. This group was slightly more diverse than the interview sample: 12 were female and three were male, 7 were White British, 6 were Black British and 2 were White Eastern European. The average age was slightly higher than in the interview sample at 16.6 years.

The majority of the interviews and observations were completed in-person, but due to COVID-19 restrictions a minority of interviews (14) were completed via telephone and a minority of observations (23 hours) were of meetings that took place over Microsoft Teams. The research received ethical approval from the University of Cambridge and the relevant Local Council. All names used in this article are pseudonyms.

This study followed a critical realist grounded theory approach (Oliver 2012). Within grounded theory practice, researchers are simultaneously involved in data collection and analysis (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Throughout the fieldwork, the researcher conducted multiple rounds of coding via NVivo, as well as the writing of analytical memos to explore emerging themes (Charmaz 2014).

FINDINGS

They’re a victim if they allow themselves to be treated as a victim. (Jess, YOS officer)

This section will examine two types of interpersonal interaction: young people’s sharing of information about their experiences of involvement in drug dealing with practitioners, and their acceptance of practitioners’ intended offers of care. Both of these interactions were important to the emergence of young people’s status as victims but were rarely realized. This section will first establish the importance of these interactions for the emergence of victim status. It will then consider why they faltered and failed, focussing on the impact of young people’s and practitioners’ diverging experiences of the interactions themselves.

Sharing information

If they spoke about what was going on when they were being interviewed, they probably would never get charged, they’d be looked at as victims rather than offenders. (Michael, CCE police team)

The sharing of information, by young people, with practitioners, about experiences of CCE was an important interpersonal interaction that facilitated the attribution of victim status: ‘the first time when I thought it was obvious that he was being exploited was because he was telling me everything’ (Marty, YOS officer). Young people’s acts of telling worked to shift practitioners towards an understanding of the young person as a victim:

If a young person came into me in a general supervision session and talked about a situation, and they were expressing that they feel trapped, exploited, there’s threats being made to them, there probably would be a more sympathetic response. (David, YOS officer)

Practitioners emphasized that such disclosures from young people were relatively rare. As such, where young people did share information, this was taken as a sign that they were genuinely at risk of harm: ‘I knew he was very frightened, because normally he wouldn’t even speak about it’ (Marty, YOS officer). Practitioners interpreted young people’s acts of telling, and in particular of openly and readily disclosing the details of their experiences, as indicators of genuine victimhood. This demonstrates that the sharing of information was an important contributor to the emergence of victim status.

Similarly, where young people were unable to share information with practitioners, this inhibited the emergence of victim status:

[Callum] has never been in trouble with the police at all, he has quite significant additional needs…so he really is vulnerable, but because he won’t tell anybody that he’s being exploited, or that he was forced to do something that he didn’t want to do – the police aren’t even going down the NRM route. So he’s actually going to be taken to court. He’s actually going to be charged. (Kerri, CCE team)

As Kerri emphasizes, despite indicators of Callum’s vulnerability, the fact that he could not disclose his experiences to the police meant that he was being taken down the path of prosecution but was not being referred to the NRM.

Despite this, interactions in which young people disclosed information to practitioners were rare. These kinds of interactions were often inhibited because they were experienced very differently by, and had different implications for, young people and practitioners.

For practitioners, young people’s ability to share information about their experiences served to fulfil or counter normative expectations that require victims to be cooperative, transparent and honest (Christie 1986; Strobl 2004). Although, as Strobl (2004) emphasizes, cooperation with the police is an important baseline expectation of the victim role in general, Flacks (2021) highlights that expectations of honesty are particularly heightened for young people in conflict with the law, for whom truth-telling is conceived of as a central component of their ongoing moral development. Police were particularly concerned that young people involved in county lines should cooperate and provide additional information about their victimization in order to try to gain an indication that they were telling the truth:

You can’t just hide behind the [NRM] form, and you’ve gotta give us more information. And if you’re not willing to give us more information either in court, or in your police interviews or by any other means, then we’re gonna throw it out essentially and you’re going to be dealt with for the offence you’ve been charged with. (Michael, CCE police team)

As demonstrated by Michael, young people who did not share information with the police were liable to be seen as having something to hide and were therefore liable to lose access to victim status.

Conversely, if practitioners viewed a young person as transparent and honest, it could help to consolidate their status as victim. Discussing the case of Noah, who he had referred to the NRM, Simon emphasized that he was confident in the referral in part because he felt Noah was sharing his experiences openly: ‘he’s saying the things that I don’t want to hear. And he’s an open and honest young man, ask him a direct question and he will answer. He just ticks all the boxes for me’ (Simon, YOS-seconded police officer). Simon connects the ‘open’ and ‘honest’ sharing of information with ‘ticking the box’ of exploitation, demonstrating the connection between acts of sharing and the expectation that ‘genuine’ victims will be transparent and honest in their interactions with practitioners.

However, sharing information had very different connotations for young people. Concerns about snitching were a particular issue: ‘Not a lot of people wanna to talk…because they’re seen as a snitch’ (Tony). This was in part related to fears about violent consequences: ‘if people run their mouths they’ll get beaten up’ (Connor), which are discussed in more detail below. However, young people also suggested that refusing to share certain information was a point of principle: ‘I’d never ever snitch on no one like that, I would never do that. I couldn’t do that’ (Mo), connected to protecting friends and associates: ‘I told the police what happened, not about any of the other people, I didn’t give them any names, I’m not a snitch’ (Vanya). Crucially, young people described acts that practitioners perceived as evidence of the ‘respectability’ that they associated with ‘credible’ victimhood as morally and socially unacceptable.

Additionally, young people and practitioners had different experiences of the practical implications of information sharing. For practitioners, information from young people was essential to the practicalities of implementing victim-orientated support. Practitioners expressed that was difficult to know what protective support to provide if young people were not able to talk about what was happening to them: ‘he’s got to engage with the police or we’re not going to get enough information to protect him’ (Abby, YOS officer, Fieldnotes). A lack of specific information from young people presented a significant barrier to understanding their needs, and practitioners found it ‘difficult to do anything in the form of intervention’ (Erica, YOS officer) that engaged with young people on the basis that they were victims if they were not able to disclose any details of their experiences. Accordingly, a lack of disclosure of information created a practical barrier to the generation of victim status.

In contrast, for young people considering sharing information about their experiences with practitioners, the practical implications of doing so were an inhibitory source of concern. A web of potentially negative consequences that young people anticipated if they disclosed information centred on the threat of physical violence from others within drug dealing networks and of criminalization from the justice system.

Young people were particularly concerned about being criminalized if they engaged with the police: ‘if you told the police, then they would arrest you for selling in the first place’ (Kazimir):

I think like kids don’t have a good opinion about the police. Especially if they’re like involved with drugs cos they don’t feel like they can speak to them. Because they think obviously like oh look they’re a police officer, they’re in the law, they’re gonna get us done. That’s what people think. And I think that’s why there’s not many people that go to them and speak about it. I just think they’re scared, knowing that something bad could come out of it. (Alex)

Alex demonstrates a perception of the police as inextricably concerned with arresting and charging those involved in drug distribution, and as unlikely to overlook offending even in contexts of CCE. These concerns also inhibited young people’s willingness to engage with YOS practitioners, as some young people assumed that any information that they gave to the YOS about involvement in drug distribution would automatically be passed on to the police:

You do have to be very very careful with what you say…[YOS practitioners] do work with the police, if they think you’re in danger they will tell the police, if they think you’re running drugs they will tell the police. So there is a lot of things that kids can and can’t say…A kid can’t go up to a practitioner like Laura [CCE team] or Jeff [YOS officer] and have a conversation with them on how they’re getting exploited, because the name of the person, their name, their drug debt, it all gets jotted down. (James)

Young people emphasized the lines of communication that ran between the different practitioners in their lives, and some therefore created ‘rules of what I can and can’t say’ (Freddie). As a result, young people were less likely to share information about exploitation with either the police or the YOS.

In addition to anticipating negative consequences from practitioners if they disclosed, young people were also concerned about the responses of others within the drug distribution networks of which they were a part:

I was scared about what would happen to me if I did accidently slip up and say somebody’s name, or somebody’s address or what I’m doing for who – I just kept everything I was doing to myself, even though I wasn’t doing it for myself. (Freddie)

The reasons that young people gave for these concerns included fear that speaking to practitioners about victimization would lead to violent consequences: ‘if they snake and they come out, they’re gonna get killed’ (Cameron), including violence directed towards families. Accordingly, for young people the experience of sharing information was far from a practical pathway towards support and was instead fraught with further risks of harm.

Practitioners, particularly those within the YOS, were aware of the risks associated with young people sharing information. However, this awareness was ultimately over-ridden by the fact that information sharing was considered a practical necessity for victim-orientated work, and by the strong association between transparency and ‘credible’ victimhood.

Acts of sharing information were important to the attribution of victim status. However, there was a clear dissonance in the ways in which young people and practitioners experienced these interactions and their implications. For practitioners, acts of sharing information signified good character and therefore aligned young people neatly and normatively with the category of ‘CCE victim’. For young people, sharing information invoked negative connotations of ‘snitching’ that would bring them into danger or disrepute. For practitioners, sharing information was understood as a gateway to support. For young people, acts of telling created the possibility of further harms inflicted by the criminal justice system and/or other peers involved in drug dealing. As a result of these conflicting experiences, the emergence of victim status through interpersonal interactions involving sharing information was rarely realized.

Acceptance of care

The second interaction that influenced whether practitioners identified young people as victims of CCE relates to offers of care. Even relatively brief and sporadic engagement with what practitioners perceived as offers of support could help to facilitate the emergence of victim status. Keith, a YOS-seconded police officer, described his decision to identify one young person, Jamie, as a victim of CCE on the basis that Jamie had reached out for help from the police. Describing the aftermath of an incident in which Jamie had turned up at a police station over one hundred miles from his home, Keith stated: ‘But in the interview, and this is where this kid who I suspect is a victim is going no, I’m doing it on my own choices…why were you running to the police there scared? That would suggest otherwise…I see him as he is a victim, personally, because I’ve seen that’ (Keith, YOS-seconded police officer). While Jamie’s subsequent refutation of victimhood might have deterred Keith from pursuing the case on this basis, the fact that he had reached out for help once convinced Keith otherwise. Keith’s response in this case demonstrates that even brief engagement could play a role in producing victim status. Engagement, construed as act of accepting support, facilitated the assignment of victim status.

More often than not, young people’s access to victim status weakened where practitioners perceived them to be unwilling to engage with the support that they were offered:

You can use, I’m a victim, I’m a victim, I’m a victim and in actual fact there’s got to come a point when you can’t argue that anymore and you’ve got to take the help that’s there for you. (Michael, CCE police team)

Meaningful engagement with victim-orientated support meant ceasing any involvement in drug dealing. When young people were arrested or convicted for subsequent drugs offences this could be interpreted as a rejection of support that compromised victim status:

If subsequently they got [the charges] kind of dropped because of them becoming the victim, and then were to get caught again dealing drugs…that would have a bearing on an NRM because they’ve been given opportunity to get out of the situation. Practitioners have offered them help. And it’s less likely to result in anything other than a court action…We’ve dealt with you as a victim. During which process you’ve had ample opportunity to request any help and support that you would need and all practitioners involved have been there to offer you that. (Simon, CCE police team)

Both Simon and Michael connect the perceived failure to accept help with the loss of access to victim status. While some practitioners, predominantly those within the YOS, did acknowledge such engagement could be extremely challenging for young people—‘most of them have got too much to lose for them to engage. They’re already being threatened, their families are already being threatened…so it’s actually please leave me alone, I don’t want to engage with you because if I do I’m in danger’ (Josie, YOS manager)—in general the view pervaded that in order to retain access to victim status young people needed to accept support, and thereby rapidly transition away from offending:

You sit there and you think, weighing this up, where does it all fall. I see that exploitation must have occurred, and obviously they are being exploited, but what point I suppose, if things have been put in place and they choose to go back…it does come down to in some respects to choice. (Lauren, YOS officer)

There are people who…have tried to go down the route that I am a victim on numerous occasions at court, that I’m aware of, to the point where that will soon start to be ignored- not ignored- but complete disbelief. (Billy, CCE police team)

In order to make and retain a claim to victim status, young people had to engage with support, which in the eyes of practitioners also meant transitioning away from offending within a relatively limited timeframe.

Accepting offers intended as acts of care was an important component of the attribution of victim status by practitioners. Again, young people and practitioners often experienced these interactions very differently. The following section will explore why the acceptance of care and support was important to practitioners’ processes of assigning victim status, and why these interactions were often problematic for young people.

Practitioners tended towards characterizing young people who they perceived as having rejected victim-orientated support by continuing to offend as ‘choosing a lifestyle’ or ‘choosing to be a criminal’. This jarred both with normative conceptualizations of victims as passive and lacking in agency (Meyers 2011), and normative assumptions that suffering resulting from an individual’s explicit choices should not qualify for victim status (Miers 1990):

With CCE there has to come a point as a professional where you start saying: are they choosing to do this? Nobody wants to make that decision as a professional, but if you’ve thrown all the support at them, the NRM etc. and they are still getting picked up for PWITS then you have to make that decision. (Chloe, YOS ETE officer)

If you carry on doing it, arguably, you’re not really still a victim you’re choosing a lifestyle…ultimately the system as it is looks at those people and says well the outs are there and you don’t take them so you’re choosing to be a criminal. (Michael, CCE police team)

This perceived incompatibility of choice and victim status was further exacerbated by the specific normative expectations surrounding victims of exploitation. Victims of exploitation are frequently stereotyped in media and policy discourse as highly vulnerable: passive and powerless (O’Connell Davidson 2015). When young people presented in ways which contradicted these pervasive perceptions of victims of exploitation, it was particularly difficult for practitioners to conceptualize them as such. As Simon put it: ‘You’ve chosen not to take that help and to continue on the path that you were on before. Therefore, it is your choice. And to say that you’ve been exploited would be very difficult’ (Simon, CCE police team). Here, the sense of ‘choice’ associated with the rejection of care and support is counterpointed not just with expectations of victim status, but with expectations of exploitation as a specific form of victimization.

Furthermore, when young people presented as hostile and unwilling to engage this conflicted with practitioners’ expectations of the presentation of exploited victims as helpless and grateful for offers of support:

And people just don’t see some of these kids - because they can be really difficult - as in, you know, sullen won’t speak, passive aggressive, suspicious, no chink in the armour to kind of get in, and no willingness to engage in conversation. It just makes it really challenging for some of the workers…it’s quite easy to just then think of them as offenders. We’ve had some interesting supervisions with people just to try and explore that cos some people say well I can’t see how he could ever be exploited. (Jennifer, Youth Offending Service Manager)

It was a struggle for practitioners faced with behaviours that they experienced as resistant to see young people as ‘exploited’. Again, young people’s presentations often ran counter not only to those most conducive to the ‘ideal victim’ (Christie 1986) more generally—but also to specific expectations around the presentation of victims of exploitation, who were expected to be both particularly helpless and willing to be helped.

Yet for young people, underlying expectations that they interact with practitioners as passive victims, who gratefully comply with the interventions offered to them, generated conflict. Young people highlighted that a lack of opportunities to express agency and control created barriers to their engagement with interventions intended as victim-orientated support. Specifically, young people described their hesitancy in engaging with practitioners whose attempts to offer support they experienced as disempowering and as resulting in feeling a loss of privacy.

For example, young people expressed reservations around engaging with practitioners’ offers of support due to concerns about the impact of potentially stigmatizing details of their lives being shared widely without their consent. Young people described valuing practitioners who worked to keep various aspects of their engagement confidential: ‘David [YOS officer] has been really supportive, obviously I’ve told [the YOS] things—confidential things—that they’ve promised to keep confidential, and they have. So obviously it’s good in that aspect’ (Freddie), but felt that this did not always happen:

[Practitioners] need to actually reassure the young person that they’re actually working with that they are trustworthy and that the information is not going to get out, that they can actually have someone to talk to…cos this is the worst thing for me, it was talking to someone and then knowing that it would go back to my Grandma. (Phoebe)

When young people felt that they lacked control over their interactions with professionals, this inhibited them from engaging further. Phoebe highlighted the challenges of feeling unable to control her interactions with the police:

I have felt like [the police CCE team] have been really controlling over my life. Like they’ve actually been physically in my body controlling me…There was one policeman that I’ve had who’s been very very forced. At first it was you can do what you want, you can give me that information when you need it. When you feel comfortable. And then he kept coming over, and over, and over. And it was: you need to give me this information or I will do it, I’ve got enough information to do it. Yeah I’d have no say in it, but I’ve got enough information to start a court order, and you’re gonna have to attend. So I felt very trapped and forced to actually give the information. (Phoebe)

Situations in which young people are unable to manage the conditions in which they engage with practitioners can feel ‘exposing and unsafe’ (Hallett 2016: 2147). For some young people, the impact of feeling a lack of choice or control in relationships with practitioners was a particular issue because this in itself could feel exploitative. This is reflected in the concerns that Phoebe raises regarding her interactions with the CCE police team, in which she describes feeling viscerally controlled, trapped and forced. While practitioners reached for interactions through which they could interpret young people as exemplifying the compliance associated with normative conceptualizations of ‘credible’ victimhood, these expectations of passivity could feel suffocating, restrictive and off-putting for young people.

The emotional experience of receiving young people’s responses to offers of care and support also had a significant impact on practitioners’ processes of victim attribution. Positive emotional connections with young people could motivate practitioners to continue to advocate for young people’s status as victims. In the extract below, Marty encapsulates the relationship between high levels of engagement and the development of a relationship of advocacy in his description of discussing criminal exploitation with a young person, Leo, in supervision:

A lot of young people will look out the window or tut or kiss their teeth or whatever, and say oh what are you talking about I’d know if that was happening. It was just- Leo maintained eye contact, he listened, he looked down at the resources I was giving him, he was sort of- when I was summarising what I was saying he was nodding, and acknowledging. He was listening to me. He was engaged. I could tell he was engaged. And we worked quite hard on trying to keep him, he almost lost his place at college. (Marty, YOS officer)

The striking intensity with which Marty recalls the minutiae of his interaction with Leo: the small specific gestures that showed him that Leo was taking the information in, highlights that a young person’s engagement can have powerful emotional significance for a practitioner. Marty links these feelings of being listened to, of connecting with Leo (he later stated: ‘it was like a light switch went on in [Leo’s] head’), and of sensing the potential to really make an impact on a young person’s life, to the act of working hard to advocate on the young person’s behalf.

Conversely, young people whom practitioners perceived as resistant and unwilling to engage were less likely to be defined as victims due to the emotional impact that this kind of presentation had on practitioners. As established in existing studies with victim advocates (Powell-Williams et al. 2013) and police (Johnson 2004; Russell and Light 2006) working on issues of domestic abuse, the perceived rejection of care and support can place emotional strain on practitioners, which can affect their perceptions of individuals as victims. For practitioners, these negative emotional experiences ranged from feelings of hurt, anger and rejection, expressed here through curt, closed phrases: ‘I do think there is cut off points…to go no you’re not being exploited. We’ve helped you. We’ve done this. You’re still doing it’ (Keith, YOS-seconded police officer); frustration and exasperation: ‘There’s all those offers there that would get them out of it, but they still go back’ (Michael, CCE police team); feeling affronted and disrespected: ‘we’re not doing another NRM, he’s rejected the support that’s been offered to him, he’s stuck two fingers up at the police’ (Richard, CPS Prosecutor, Fieldnotes); and a sense of sadness that young people did not feel able to accept their care: ‘we are not ever gonna know if they don’t want us to. Where do you go with that? Sorry, that’s upset me’ (Bev, YOS officer). At times, the emotional strain of feeling that offers of support were being repeatedly rejected made it more difficult for practitioners work with young people as victims.

In contrast, young people tended to reflect on a perceived impossibility of connecting with practitioners from the outset. Lack of shared experience presented an insurmountable barrier that caused engagements with offers of care to fail before they had really begun: ‘if someone is trying to talk to me, and trying to tell me, boss me around, tell me what’s good for me, they need to be someone who has been in the same position’ (Dan). What having ‘been in the same position’ meant in practice varied according to young people’s intersecting identities and lived experiences. Lack of shared experience was raised as a particular issue in relation to racialized marginalization and racism: ‘You’re all white snitches and that’s why we don’t talk to you’ (Lucas, Fieldnotes); a lack of shared class identity: ‘‘I feel like the higher class and the middle class don’t want everybody on the same level as them…they don’t wanna see people succeed’ (Tori); and the difficulties of forming connections with someone who held a ‘professional’ role that felt distant and unfamiliar: ‘they ask questions and sound like a robot do you know what I’m saying. It doesn’t really feel like you’re talking to a real human cos they got rules and regulations on how they have to ask questions about certain things’ (Kyle). Across these aspects of identity, lack of shared experience recurred as a barrier to building relationships with practitioners in the eyes of young people, stymying the potential for connections formed through the acceptance of care, and thereby inhibiting the emergence of victim status.

CONCLUSION

Interpersonal interactions between young people and practitioners play a key role in determining how and whether young people are conceptualized as victims of CCE. Specifically, interactions in which young people can share information or accept care are critical in influencing whether children are identified as victims of CCE or as offenders involved in drug dealing. The label ‘CCE victim’ requires children to present as honest and transparent, passive and helpless, and to cooperate gratefully with victim-orientated support. Adherence to these criteria is demonstrated through interactions with practitioners who have power to attribute victim status. The impact of these relational dynamics demonstrates the importance of considering the role that interactions play in the production of victim status more broadly (Holstein and Miller 1990; Rock 2002; Marshall 2023b).

As this article explores, there is often a dissonance between practitioners’ and young people’s experiences of interacting with each other. Young people may feel unable to share information about their lives with practitioners due to fear of negative ramifications from peers, and from the criminal justice system. Similarly, acts that practitioners intend as offers of care may be experienced by young people as controlling, or as difficult to connect with due to lack of shared experience. As a result, young people may not engage in interactions in ways that practitioners expect. When young people are unable to interact in a way that conforms to practitioners’ normative expectations of how ‘genuine’ victims should behave, they are likely to lose access to victim status.

Understanding the processes by which children are, or more often are not, constructed as ‘victims of CCE’ generates insights into wider constructions of social order. In particular, the deployment of conceptualizations of ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ are ‘closely tied to particular ideological visions for society’ (McAra 2023: 698). Attempts to produce CCE victim status, through highly specific forms of interactions with adults, constitute a symbolic act of gripping on tighter, clasping the child, conceived of as passive and helpless, to one’s chest in order to withhold them from corrupting influences. This mode of interaction between adult and child may reflect, like so many other interventions in conceptualizations childhood, an attempt to recapture a ‘sense of lost order’ (Brown 2005: 14) through approaches intended to closely safeguard children as representatives of a society’s future.

Just as constructions of childhood provide sites at which we attempt to ‘manage’ the ‘tensions and contradictions of the age’ (Brown 2005: 10), the construction of CCE victim status is a site at which the complexities of the contemporary youth justice system are confronted. The youth justice system is influenced by elements of a ‘victim-threat dualism’ (Goldson 2007: 105), and infused with many competing rationales, including protection, inclusion and care, punishment, exclusion and control (McAra 2023). As a framing, CCE combines repressive and protective elements and thereby goes some way towards supressing these competing tensions. This is exemplified in the way that CCE victim identification requires modes of interaction in which children conform to restrictive adult-defined expectations of ‘genuine’ victim status, including cooperation and passivity (Brown 2015).

Such requirements risk inhibiting recognition of children’s agency and the validity of their own distinct social worlds. This stands in clear contrast to calls to work collaboratively with young people and to centre their voices within youth justice policy and practice (Smith 2009; Youth Justice Board 2021). Resonating with existing research that suggests that children’s agency is recognized only when their choices are deemed by adults to be the ‘right’ ones (Bordonaro 2012), the ways that processes of CCE victim identification unfold exemplify a point of retreat from engagement with children as agentive actors within contemporary youth justice practice.

This is of particular importance as research into related issues of child sexual exploitation (Phoenix 2002) and violence between young people (Billingham and Irwin-Rogers 2022), demonstrates how rhetorics of victimhood and/or ‘child saving’ risk occluding recognition of young people as engaged in agentive acts of survivalism. This is not to say that young people’s experiences of causing and/or receiving harm should not be recognized or addressed. Rather, it is a call to listen to young people’s assertions of both their participation in criminalized activity, and the ways that they respond to practitioners, as part of strategies for navigating poverty and other forms of structural violence (Marshall 2022). In doing so, we must reiterate demands to address the structural harms long-recognized as contributing to children’s contact with the justice system (Pitts 2013).

Relatedly, the fact that interactions intended to produce CCE victim status often faltered and failed in the ways described above raises questions for the utility of attributing ‘CCE victim status’ as a response to young people’s experiences of harm. Exploring interactions between practitioners and young people enables us to uncover the limitations of selective and exclusionary processes of victim identification. This in turn calls attention to the potential benefits of more universal social harm-focussed approaches (Billingham and Irwin-Rogers 2022) that seek to address structural harms for all young people regardless of whether they can conform to normative expectations of victim status.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Caroline Lanskey, Loraine Gelsthorpe, Jane Dominey, Kate Brown and the reviewers and editors for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article. I am very grateful to all those who participated in this research.

FUNDING

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [2131944].

REFERENCES