Social workers, safeguarding practitioners and youth justice professionals looking for a child criminal exploitation assessment tool will find a structured format for recording concerns about children, teenagers and young people at risk of CCE. It supports careful information gathering around vulnerability, behaviour change, visible indicators and community risk, rather than relying on a single checklist.
In multi-agency safeguarding meetings, the CCE-Assessment-Tool can help organise what is known about a young person where criminal exploitation, county lines, trafficking, coercion or grooming may be suspected. It is designed for ongoing recording, assessment and monitoring of risk.
The form begins with background information, including the young person’s age, gender, ethnicity, disability, living arrangements, education, employment or training, and agencies already involved. Practitioner details are also recorded, making it easier to keep a clear professional record.
A visible section focuses on individual-level vulnerabilities linked to child criminal exploitation. Prompts include age, previous abuse, additional learning needs, difficulty making friends, being overly trusting or easily manipulated, care experience, accommodation issues and authoritarian or restrictive parenting or care arrangements.
The introduction explains why disclosure may be difficult for children and teens, including fear of repercussions, fear of being criminalised, and not recognising that exploitation is happening. It also emphasises that risk can fluctuate and that different agencies may hold different pieces of information.
Practitioners could use the assessment tool in safeguarding supervision, youth offending work, children’s services, education welfare, missing children responses or multi-agency case discussions. Developed by Nina Maxwell as part of Cardiff University and CASCADE work on child criminal exploitation in Wales, it is aimed at improving identification, recording and safeguarding decisions.
