Clare Mccrumlish
Principal Practice Advisor, Child Exploitation Response Team
From crisis response to system disruption: A child protection and intelligence-led approach for tackling child exploitation
Child sexual and criminal exploitation are evolving rapidly, increasingly characterised by online grooming, peer recruitment, coercive control, organised criminal involvement, and cross-jurisdictional offending. Traditional service responses are often reactive, siloed, and incident-focused and struggle to disrupt exploitation pathways before significant harm occurs.
The Victorian government provided funding for the expansion of the sexual exploitation practice leadership roles throughout the state and the establishment of a central child exploitation response team (CERT). With a focus on uplifting practice responses to child exploitation and building an intelligence capability, the CERT
reframes child exploitation as both a child protection issue and a sophisticated organised harm environment requiring prevention, disruption, and intelligence-informed intervention.
Central to the initiative is a shift from viewing exploited children as "risk creators" to recognising them as children experiencing targeted abuse, coercion, and manipulation. This reframing can significantly change engagement approaches with adolescents who may previously have been labelled "non-compliant," "offending," or "hard to engage."
This paper will explore:
- The development of a statewide exploitation practice framework within a human services environment
- Strategies for embedding exploitation-focused capability across frontline services
- Emerging opportunities to use data, systems mapping, and early intervention to prevent exploitation before a crisis point
- Lessons learned from collaboration between child protection practitioners and law enforcement
- Challenges in balancing child-centred practice with investigative and community safety imperatives
Rather than focusing solely on individual incidents, the approach examines exploitation ecosystems, including locations, networks, recruitment methods, repeat perpetrators, and systemic vulnerabilities. It combines statutory child protection practice, place-based prevention, and operational partnerships with law enforcement to identify patterns of exploitation earlier and intervene before escalation.
At a time when child protection and law enforcement agencies are under increasing pressure to respond to complex presentations involving trauma, missing episodes, family violence, youth criminalisation, mental health concerns, and digital exploitation, there is good reason to stop working in parallel and move towards true collaboration.
Open Access