‘They’re not seeing young people as victims’: Professional perspectives on policy and practice for criminally exploited children in Wales

Despite the United Kingdom’s robust child protection policies and approaches to modern slavery, no specific UK-wide policy addresses the criminal exploitation of children. This paper presents multi-agency focus group and survey findings from a commissioned study which examined the adoption of policy and practice in Wales. Rather than a Wales-led, child-rights national framework, participants encountered inconsistency between a preponderance and absence of relevant guidance from the United Kingdom and Wales. Participants wanted the separation of criminal exploitation from the Modern Slavery Act 2015, a legal definition and amendment of the Children Acts 1989 and 2004 to include exploitation as a separate category of child abuse.