By Storm Marsh-Smith. Published 13 October 2025.
Reflections from the ‘Vulnerability and Policing: Reducing Harm, Strengthening Justice’ conference 2025
There was no holding back in the lively, passionate discussions across the two-day conference. Themes of trauma, repeated institutional failings within public services designed to keep us safe, and numerous accounts of injustice emerged – often difficult to listen to, let alone unpick. Yet before we even dispersed into different sessions, one opening remark from Professor Nick Plant had already grabbed my undivided attention. He reminded us that, as researchers, academics, professionals, and civil servants, we have an unspoken duty: “to leave the world a better place than when we entered it.”
I couldn’t help but ponder, as I eagerly waited for the introductory keynote from Professor Carlene Firmin MBE, whether this was truly feasible given ‘the state we’re in’ – a phrase that coincidentally is also the title of a thought-provoking TV series recently released by award-winning Darren McGarvey, who was also in attendance at the conference.
“What a time to be alive? Why growing up in the UK is tougher than ever”
As a Postgraduate Researcher exploring “How do Mechanisms of Care and Control Influence the Support Young People Receive through Criminal Sexual Exploitation (CSE) Diversionary Interventions”? – I felt privileged to be able to see Professor Firmin present live: the academic who first coined the term ‘contextual safeguarding’. This is a powerful concept to help raise awareness in society on how together we can improve safeguarding responses to tackle extra-familial harms affecting today’s adolescents.
Across the country, young people are experiencing unprecedented levels of risk and harm beyond their homes – in schools, online spaces, peer groups, and even within their romantic relationships. Violence and exploitation have become woven into too many of these contexts, placing increasing pressure on already overstretched public services.
The Youth Endowment Fund recently reported that one in four children in England and Wales had either been a victim of violence or committed a violent offence themselves in 2023. 79% of child protection social workers stated they’ve noticed a dramatic increase in caseloads involving harm outside the home. Even more troubling, the Home Office statistics show that young people are increasingly over-represented in referrals to Prevent (a fact we discussed in a later session), with the highest terrorism arrest rate for young people in five years, highlighting growing concerns around youth radicalisation.
When Professor Firmin stated in her keynote speech, “we currently live in a society where we don’t like young people,” I couldn’t help but resonate with that uncomfortable, powerful, yet truthful statement. As a researcher exploring CSE – recognised not only as a major public health concern but as a global health emergency – her words struck a deep chord. Professor Firmin illustrated how negative media narratives, cultural stereotyping, and generational misunderstandings of youth combine to create a damaging public perception: that young people are a “drain on society.”
Portraying young people as ‘risky’ rather than simply ‘risk-taking’ during adolescence has helped to cultivate a ‘risk and blame’ culture. Here, young people can be inadvertently defined by which side of the line they fall on when encountering the police (and social services) – either ‘at risk of harm’ or a ‘potential risk to others’. This binary framing contributes to what academics describe as a risk-averse society, where professional decisions, particularly in policing and social care, are often shaped more by fear of risk than by recognition of need.
One case study we were invited to reflect on captured this tension powerfully – the case of ‘Child Q’. This young Black student was wrongly suspected of carrying cannabis at school. The school called the police, and the fifteen-year-old girl was taken to a room and strip-searched while menstruating, without an appropriate adult present. No drugs were found. Professor Firmin used this case to highlight how professional judgement can be clouded by preoccupations with risk and racial stereotyping, leading to serious breaches of dignity and safeguarding principles.
The rising prevalence of county lines activity, criminal and sexual exploitation, gang involvement, and weapon-carrying has produced countless cases where young people are, as Professor Firmin put it, “punished rather than protected.” This stems partly from blurred understandings of victimhood and perpetration – where age, gender, ethnicity, perceived agency, and assumptions about what a “real victim” should act and look like influence how professionals respond.
If a ten-year-old child is given drugs by an adult and found carrying or dealing them, does that make the child a criminal or someone in need of care and protection? The answer often depends on how adults interpret their behaviour. Yet ultimately, young people need community guardianship rooted in care, not purely justice-oriented responses – particularly from policing professionals.
Young people more than ever are highly surveilled, with a huge focus on prevention, risk and diversion, not just by the police, but by social workers and by the state. Surveillance leads to over-policing, particularly in communities of colour who represent some of the most structurally vulnerable groups in the UK. Concerns over risk often lead to multiple referrals to different services, meanwhile, as Professor Firmin rightly points out, we forget that young people are natural born “risk takers” and don’t reach full brain development till age 25.
The prefrontal cortex which controls humans risk assessing, planning and importantly impulse control develops more slowly than the limbic system, which is directly linked to award seeking and emotions. From a harm reduction perspective, it is critical professionals understand young people are not cognitively designed to respond to risk effectively until later in life. When adult-centric decision processes ‘forget this fact’, unfortunately adult perpetrators don’t.
Perpetrators know exactly what young people want, which is seen in the complex, yet often simple grooming strategies used to exploit today’s vulnerable young people. From a justice perspective, the Youth Criminal Justice System (YCJS), must try and embrace a more nuanced understanding of vulnerability, agency, and the blurred lines between victimhood and offending if true justice is to ever be achieved.
“New markets, New technologies, and old harms”
The theme of exploitation continued into a later session that day – “Preventing exploitation in illicit markets” featuring several researchers from the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre and a detective who specialises in organised crime. The market? Illegal vapes. The target? Numerous convenience store owners who were using illegal vapes to groom young people, discovered by the police using gathered intelligence. How? With a four-step method – Protect, Prepare, Prevent, and Pursue.
Although illegal vape pens may on the surface appear relatively low-level crime, we were starkly reminded that at least 1 in 10 vapes contain the synthetic highly addictive cannabinoid Spice. Easily accessible online and offline for young people, drugs spilling into illicit markets unfortunately do not stop at Spice.
The phenomenon of ‘Cuckooing’ is also on the rise – where the property of a vulnerable person is taken over by a drug gang, for example a drug user, who is then forced to comply and exploited. It is only with the introduction of the Crime and Policing Bill 2025 that cuckooing is to be made a standalone offence with the police and other services having to find new and inventive ways to stop the fallout from organised drug dealing. More now than ever it is not just adults being pulled and forced into criminal exploitation (CE), with vulnerable young people being manipulated, forced and coerced into carrying drugs (and weapons) from cities to more suburban areas.
To try and tackle the response, a new innovative virtual reality headset has been created, called – Behind Closed Doors: The Cuckooing Hazard Perception Test, co-designed by researchers from the University of Leeds, the police and local councils. I have taken the test and was blown away by just how ‘real’ the test managed to convey the clear terrifying dangers of ‘Child Criminal Exploitation (CCE) and CSE’ – which tend to overlap.
Designed to be ‘young person friendly’, the headset is being used by practitioners and young people in schools, as a response to identifying the warning signs to combat the rise of ‘cuckooing’. ‘Players’ are taken through a multitude of different scenarios (similar to a car hazard perception test), where they are given autonomy over their decisions over the player in the game. Stark, eye opening and highly educational, I recommend any practitioner or schools interested in learning more about CCE to get signed up to play!
Sign on the line! But this isn’t what I signed up for?
The conference helped highlight that society’s current problems are not just from new crime trends or the fallout from criminal activity. There was no better way to understand this than by listening to the implications that police are currently facing during the session ‘Preventing Exploitation in Illegal Markets’. Police more than ever are considered a ‘jack of all trades’, which is causing a huge implication for policing. They are called to a wide range of incidents including mental health crises (with the majority of officers saying they do not feel trained or equipped to respond to), people going missing (for example people living with Alzheimer’s), overdoses, and increasing child protection matters which the police feel Social Workers should be allocated to.
In part this is due to underfunding, understaffing across multi-agency borders, and continued confusion on “whose responsibility is it” when a 999 call is placed, yet the ‘right’ professional is not able to respond. The police simply cannot ‘just leave it’. Yet, public perception has been damaged and confidence lost, not just in policing but in mental health, the NHS and social work too. But where does that leave the police?
Between securing convictions and saving lives, the police state they generally signed up to combat crime. Yet, in numerous studies shown to us, the police expressed their dissatisfaction and general frustrations in modern day policing and the many different roles placed upon them. The police are frequently called out to mental health emergencies, yet the research data shows us that the police are in fact in need of mental health support themselves due to compassion fatigue, excessive caseloads, burnout and vicarious trauma for attending scenes such as suicides.
Given the increased pressures police now face, the paucity of resources and the undeniable burgeoning demand, there is little respite. However, micro and macro change is critically recognised, needed and demanded by the public and policy makers alike. Vulnerable people are being arrested (or detained) for minor offences due to lack of options. Should a person who is suicidal be left at home or detained for their own safety when there are no mental health beds, even if it means in a cell?
Systemic change is urgently needed — as evidenced by the recent Panorama documentary exposing racism, misogyny, violence, and Islamophobia within the Metropolitan Police. These deep-rooted prejudices undermine trust and directly harm the very communities the police are charged with protecting. Yet, while accountability is essential, constant public criticism without acknowledging the pressures officers face risks unintended consequences. Resource constraints, high workloads, and the emotional labour of policing make recruitment and retention increasingly difficult, potentially deterring skilled candidates and placing even greater strain on those who remain.
Real transformation requires a dual approach: holding systems and individuals to account while also investing in them. Increasing funding, enhancing training, and strengthening accountability — from police forces to social workers to mental health professionals — would not only expose those unfit for the role but also cultivate a workforce equipped with the values, skills, and compassion necessary to safeguard vulnerable people. In doing so, we could shift from a culture that too often punishes marginalised communities to one that protects and empowers them.
Final thoughts – “rethinking justice and vulnerability”
As the conference drew to a close, what resonated most strongly with me — and, I sensed, with others — was that regardless of whether we enter these debates as academics, police officers, practitioners, people with lived experience, or simply as citizens, we each carry the responsibility, as Professor Plant reminded us, “to leave the world a better place than when we entered it.” I believe people really felt this due to the nature and topics of sensitive research discussed and the amount of emotional labour that goes into researching these problems firsthand.
Author and social commentator Darren McGarvey’s provocation about who decides who ‘gets to be vulnerable’ and ‘why’ underscored that this responsibility is neither straightforward nor comfortable to discuss. For me, as a CSE doctoral researcher, (with lived experience on more than one topic discussed), the challenge appears to lie in how we hold space for these tensions, and how we address the dominant ‘deserving vs undeserving discourse’ still at play – which is still overflowing in our welfare, healthcare and justice system – going all the way back to the 19th century!
From attending the conference, I understand how ‘risk aversion limits bold change’. The systems we have designed often prioritise managing perceived risk over addressing root causes due to anxiety and fear, which inadvertently is known to perpetuate harm, particularly for the marginalised classed as vulnerable. Ultimately, the conference reinforced for me that rethinking justice, harm and vulnerability is not just an intellectual exercise; it is a moral and practical imperative.
As researchers, practitioners, and professionals, we must continuously ask difficult questions, confront uncomfortable truths, and actively work to ensure that the paradigm of care and control we work within and study, genuinely reduces harm for the people we are working with. The question that lingers for me is not whether harm can be reduced or justice strengthened, but whether we, collectively, are willing to shoulder the responsibility of care for those labelled as ‘vulnerable’?