A year after Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to “cut the head off the snake” of county lines, thousands of children are still not being kept safe, says the Children’s Commissioner for England.
A report, “Still not safe: The public health response to youth violence” shows a lack of coordination between agencies responsible for helping to keep vulnerable children safe; failing to prevent thousands of children from falling through gaps in the education, health, justice and care systems. It’s leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and grooming from criminal organisations, or others who seek to abuse them.
Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield said that the research was undertaken before the pandemic, ‘which is only likely to have increased vulnerability further’, where children are bored and lonely, and ‘increasingly at risk in parks and takeaways, with predators waiting to pounce’. She said: “The dire consequences of criminal exploitation and serious violence on children are clear to see – the regular toll on young lives is played out across our newspapers and TV news bulletins with depressing regularity. The grim library of serious case reviews lay bare the stories of children who have come to harm, or even lost their lives.
“The common thread throughout all these cases is the series of missed opportunities, from a broad range of agencies, to intervene and protect these vulnerable children.
“Predators who seek to exploit children for financial gain will use sophisticated methods to target, groom and coerce children. They are ruthless in their efforts to keep children in their thrall, subjecting them to unspeakable abuse, threats and intimidation. If intervention comes when children are already entangled in these dangerous enterprises, it is difficult to reach them. In the context of a global pandemic, it is easy to understand how these issues could drop down the agenda, but it is vital they are prioritised at all levels.
“To keep children safe, the response to youth violence must be a national priority across policing, public health and children’s services. We need equally strong national leadership in each of these three fields, backed up by local partnership working. This is the only way to fully implement a genuine public health approach across the country.
“Tragically, until there is this joined up public health response to gangs that identifies and helps all those children at risk as early as possible, teenagers will keep dying on our streets.”
The report warns the threat of gang exploitation shows no sign of abating. Research published in 2019 by the Children’s Commissioner found around 27,000 children at high risk of gang exploitation who had not been identified by services, and as such were missing out on vital support to keep them safe. However, the number of children experiencing broader risk factors linked to exploitation is even larger: 120,000 children – one in 25 of all teens in England – are already falling through gaps in education and social care. Such as: children are being excluded from school or are persistently absent – often attending alternative provision; or children who are going missing from care, many facing a combination of factors that could leave them vulnerable to exploitation. The report argues that often these children are not receiving the extra support they need from the state, and that interventions to reduce these vulnerabilities are key.
The Children’s Commissioner is warning that these numbers are likely to increase in the aftermath of the pandemic, as the crisis has increased many of the risk factors of childhood vulnerability. Moreover, the pandemic has meant that the most vulnerable children are even harder to identify – November saw a 12 per cent drop in referrals to children’s services, in spite of the increased risks. It seems likely that even more children at risk of exploitation are going undetected. While this report’s research was undertaken with data from before the pandemic, the lockdowns are likely to have increased vulnerability further.
The way criminal gangs are also constantly adapting to changing circumstances, hence the report making a case for a public health response which looks at children’s underlying vulnerability to criminal gangs, rather than responding to the form the gang are taking at a particular time.
The report praises the Home Office’s allocation of large sums to combat serious violence, most recently a further £35.5m to Violence Reduction Units (VRUs).
Among the report’s wide-ranging recommendations, schools should be used in the efforts to prevent serious youth violence; and exclusion from schools should be a last resort. Specific public health funding should be provided to local authorities to deal with criminal exploitation and serious violence. The report calls for national leadership to drive the issue as a priority for councils, including support for better use of data, to understand who is at risk.
In a foreword to the report, Anne Longfield said that gangs have adapted to avoid detection, recruiting local children as runners and using taxis, often booked via apps, or hire vehicles. “Children exploited locally are recruited by peers or using end-to-end encrypted mass-market social media apps. While not a new phenomenon, it is one that, like remote working in our lives, has been accelerated during the pandemic. Because of this evolution of gangs’ operating models, it is more important than ever that each local authority develops a better understanding of their situation locally.”
Separately, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons has published a report, Children in Custody 2019-20 – An analysis of 12-18-year-olds’ perceptions of their experiences in secure training centres and young offender institutions. The survey of children in secure training centres and young offender institutions found youths exposed to violence and self-injury, and were spending long periods locked inside their cells even before the pandemic.
