Records & plans
What is child exploitation?
Child exploitation is where a child is coerced or manipulated into activity — sexual, criminal or both — in exchange for something, or through threat. Looked-after children are at heightened risk.
It rarely presents as a single incident. It presents as a pattern: unexplained absences, new possessions, older associates, a change in behaviour, going missing to the same place.
That pattern is only visible if the individual observations were recorded. A concern that seemed minor on its own is the reason contemporaneous recording matters so much in this setting.
Children being exploited frequently do not see themselves as victims, which is why the response cannot depend on disclosure and why the observations of the people around them carry so much weight.
In practice
A fourteen-year-old with a new phone and older friends.
He is happier than he has been for months, which is why nobody wants to see it. Each individual fact has an ordinary explanation.
Exploitation presents as a child's life improving, and the indicators are things adults are inclined to be pleased about. The gifts, the lifts, the going out — none is alarming alone.
What makes it visible is the pattern across records, and what makes it invisible is each shift seeing one piece of it.
What goes wrong in practice
- Individually minor observations not recorded, so no pattern ever appears.
- Response dependent on the child disclosing.
- Missing episodes treated as behaviour rather than as a potential indicator.