Tackling extra-familial exploitation in public law

What are we protecting our children and young people from, and where does the true risk lie? Whilst our child protection system was historically built around the family home, a significant proportion of the risk faced by young people today is extra-familial. Why are children experiencing exploitation, grooming, or coercive control so often misunderstood by safeguarding systems, particularly when harm occurs outside the domestic environment?

Decades of state inquiry, review, and precedent indicate that part of the answer lies in a persistent lack of granular data regarding the extent of extra-familial risks, which in turn limits our capacity to disrupt them effectively. Furthermore, our legal and regulatory tools to disrupt such harm remain blunt instruments, often available only in the most severe cases.

IICSA’s 2022 investigation into organised networks—in which I acted as lead counsel for LBTH—found that missed opportunities were frequently rooted in an erroneous perception of children possessing genuine choice and agency. A key recommendation focused on the language employed by professionals. The report identified victim-blaming terminology that placed responsibility, shame, or blame onto children for their own exploitation, noting that practitioners routinely referred to severe abuse as "risky behaviour" or "risky choices."

A child cannot lawfully consent to her own exploitation; what appears to be consent is almost invariably the product of sophisticated grooming. While Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023 formally adopted the term "extra-familial harm" and required it to be weighed in every children’s social care assessment, a framework designed to manage intra-familial risk still struggles to protect a teenager harmed outside the home, whether by adults or peer networks.

When extra-familial harm reaches a courtroom, the system’s natural gravity pulls towards the parent who is present rather than the elusive network that is not. Yet the scale of extra-familial risk is immense. Professor Jay’s 2014 report identified at least 1,400 children exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Baroness Casey’s 2025 audit found data management so deficient that perpetrator ethnicity went unrecorded in roughly two-thirds of cases, and children were still routinely disbelieved. The statutory national inquiry convened following that audit faces the critical task of explaining why fifteen years of institutional findings have yielded so little systemic change.

Public authorities and the state are attempting to adapt. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 introduces a specific offence of child criminal exploitation (s.48), makes grooming an explicit aggravating factor in sentencing (s.83), and criminalises the obstruction of a report (s.92). Additionally, the 2026 Act creates targeted offences addressing AI-generated abuse material and the online facilitation of exploitation (ss.72–77), building upon the Online Safety Act’s illegal-content duties in force since March 2025.