This a Policy Report ‘Creation of a Child Criminal Exploitation (CCE) criminal offence in England and Wales’, authored by Dr Alicia Heys, a Senior Lecturer at the Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull, and Dr Marija Jovanovic, a Research Fellow in Business and Human Rights at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford and a Senior Lecturer at the Essex Law School (University of Essex). Both are co-investigators in the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC) at the University of Oxford. The PEC Policy Impact Team supported the drafting of this Policy Report. The Modern Slavery and Human Rights PEC at the University of Oxford is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The views expressed in this summary and the full report are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funders.
This policy report aims to inform policy considerations arising from the creation of a standalone Child Criminal Exploitation (CCE) criminal offence in England and Wales by the Crime and Policing Bill 2025. It considers the implications of creating the new offence for the broader legal framework on modern slavery in the UK, in particular, the implications for the identification and support of children subject to CCE, the prosecution of the perpetrators, and the prevention of CCE. The Policy Report also provides specific recommendations to suggest ways to address some of the complexities identified.
The Report is structured around the following themes:
- The relationship between the notions of CCE and modern slavery
- The relationship between a standalone CCE criminal offence and the wider modern slavery legal landscape in the UK
- Key considerations arising from the introduction of a CCE Offence by the Crime and Policing Bill
- The necessity of a separate CCE offence
Given that CCE represents a form of modern slavery, this analysis underscores the importance of ensuring that the new offence does not create unintended consequences or undermine current efforts to prosecute the offences contained within the Modern Slavery Act 2015 (MSA). Accordingly, in parallel with efforts to enforce the new offence of CCE, the report recommends focusing resources and efforts on improving the implementation of the existing criminal offences within the MSA.
Key considerations in the report include:
- Ensuring the wording of the offence is flexible enough to capture new and emerging forms of CCE that may arise
- Ensuring that the new offence offers benefits similar to those that are unique to the MSA, such as ancillary orders
- Ensuring that a statutory defence is available for children who have committed a criminal offence as a direct result of being a victim of CCE
- Adding the new CCE offence to Schedule 4 of the MSA (offences for which the statutory defence cannot be used) to ensure that CCE offenders are unable to use this defence.
The report notes in particular numerous concerns about the implementation of the statutory defence under Section 45 of the MSA and recommends that the Government prioritises addressing these concerns to ensure that all victims of CCE, regardless of where the offence sits, are fairly supported by this defence.
The report also highlights the need to distinguish, in policy terms, the enforcement of the new CCE offence from the identification and support of victims of CCE, and that the Home Office must ensure that the overall legal and policy response to CCE remain in line with the UK’s obligations under human rights law and international legal frameworks.
Notwithstanding these recommendations, the report questions whether the Government has demonstrated that a new criminal offence of CCE is necessary, given that there are already existing offences which cover the targeted behaviour and which have been used to prosecute such behaviour successfully, although prosecutions remain low for all forms of exploitation.
