By Gina Vale
In December 2021, terrorism charges against a 14-year-old British girl were dropped—not due to lack of engagement with extremist networks, but on account of the power dynamics of her digital relationships therein. The Home Office Single Competent Authority (SCA) determined that she was a victim of modern slavery in the UK for the specific purposes of criminal exploitation and sexual exploitation. Despite no physical interaction, her online communications with an adult male extremist in the USA were found to be sufficient evidence for her recruitment and digital control, leading her to download extreme right-wing propaganda and instructions for manufacturing a 3D-printed firearm.
This was the first—and so far, only—case where the UK’s Modern Slavery Act 2015 provided a statutory defence for a child facing terrorism charges. Less than five months after its discontinuation, the girl died by suicide. Her story raises urgent questions: Are we prosecuting children who should be protected? And can our legal and policy frameworks recognise when terrorism and exploitation intersect?
In a recent article, I propose a cross-harm approach to children’s online recruitment and engagement in terrorism. Drawing on 30 interviews and two workshops with experts in counter-terrorism, anti-slavery, child protection, and digital safety, I argue that such online dynamics can, and should, be considered as a form of child criminal exploitation. Here, I outline the key challenges and promise of bringing together hitherto siloed theory and practice.
Rising Juvenile Terrorism Meets Digital Exploitation
The UK is experiencing unprecedented levels of child involvement in terrorism, with 42 arrests in the last year alone. Since 2016, 59 children have been convicted for offences ranging from downloading terrorist content to late-stage attack plotting. Most cases involve purely online activity. Yet, we face a fundamental problem: scholarship, policy, and practice treat exploitation and terrorism as separate issues when they are increasingly interconnected. Research has warned of a ‘collective social media blind spot’ concerning how technologies enable children’s involvement in serious violence.
Whilst early cases of radicalisation involving British teenagers were framed through language of grooming, this narrative has shifted dramatically towards responsibilisation and prosecution. Only three UK legal cases have explicitly questioned juvenile terrorism activity through dynamics of exploitation. However, in February 2024, the UK Home Secretary accepted recommendations to remove all terrorism offences from the purview of the statutory defence provided by section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, eliminating a vital legal safeguard for exploited children.
The Challenge and Promise of A Cross-Harm Approach
Children targeted for terrorist recruitment and indoctrination share characteristics with those exploited for sexual abuse—approximately 40% are neurodivergent or have special educational needs, and many have adverse childhood experiences. Moreover, the patterns of recruit-recruiter relationships mirror those in cases of sexual exploitation: identifying vulnerabilities, building trust, isolating from protective networks, and exercising coercive control through digital means. The central feature to all forms of exploitation—whether sexual, financial, or even ideological—is power imbalance. Importantly, this is not limited to the traditional dynamic of adult perpetrator and child victim, but can also encompass the increasing trend of peer-radicalisation among children and youth.
To tackle these intersecting harms upstream, current regulations for online platforms need to shift the focus of moderation from content to communications. The Online Safety Act 2023 has been praised for its aim to stymie proliferation and access to child sexual abuse material and branded terrorist propaganda. However, the legislation has faced considerable criticism for its application only to major platforms, and an approach centred on the exclusion of children from potentially dangerous online spaces, rather than child-safe redesign. In 2024, Ofcom rejected recommendations to extend protections against child sexual abuse (e.g. enhanced user controls and support for child users) to include terrorism, despite acknowledging that ‘the measure may mitigate the radicalisation of children in some cases where the targeted functionalities are used in a similar way to commit grooming’. Redesign of digital safety policy to respond to recruitment and communication patterns—not just individual content—will ensure that children do not fall between the cracks created by a ‘harm-by-harm’ approach.
Professional siloes are ineffective and create barriers to recognising victim-perpetrators. There is a lack of cross-harm dialogue and training across professions—counter-terrorism officers are not trained to recognise exploitation, whilst child protection workers can struggle to identify radicalisation dynamics, particularly when confined to purely online activity. While some law enforcement practitioners note informal connections being made between terrorism and modern slavery investigations, such collaborations ‘came down more to personalities’ than formalised strategy[KV1] [GV2] . These siloes have a knock-on effect for safeguarding. Unlike other serious crimes against children, terrorism cases do not automatically trigger exploitation assessments. The Home Office’s annual statistics for referrals to its National Referral Mechanism (NRM) do not include data for terrorism as a sub-type of child criminal exploitation. Rather, the approach to juvenile terrorism-related activity is led through Prevent, which despite a ‘safeguarding’ framing has been heavily criticised for securitising children and vulnerable youth. In the case of the 14-year-old girl, NRM requests were delayed, and she was never interviewed as a victim. In light of the missed opportunities leading to her death, her legal team advocate for the automatic dual referral to Prevent and the NRM for all children suspected of involvement in terrorism, as well as the expansion of ‘first responders’ able to refer to the NRM to include lawyers, teachers, and other frontline community actors.
Conclusion
The intersection of online child exploitation and terrorism represents unfamiliar territory, but the evidence is clear: children are being recruited and controlled through digital channels for terrorist purposes. Their victimisation does not excuse or diminish their actions, but it must inform our response.
We face a choice. We can continue prosecuting victimised children as terrorists, missing opportunities for intervention and potentially contributing to tragic outcomes. Or, we can adopt a cross-harm approach that recognises complexity, prioritises child welfare, and develops more effective responses to both exploitation and radicalisation. Section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 is central to this paradigm shift. While not intended or proposed as a blanket ‘get out of jail free card’, the opportunity for a statutory defence acts as an important backstop against default criminalisation. The suggested exclusion of all terrorism offences from this protection is an urgent concern. Reliance on the public interest test for prosecution, or mitigation at sentencing, has thus far resulted in surging numbers of juvenile terrorism convictions.
This blog is based on the article Vale, G. (2025). Exploited for the Cause?: The Potential for a Cross-Harm Approach to Children’s Online Engagement in Terrorism. British Journal of Criminology, online first, 1-18.
Dr Gina Vale is a Lecturer of Criminology in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Southampton. She is also an Associate Fellow of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) and a Member of the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence.
Image Credit: Photo by Karla Rivera on Unsplash