My research focuses upon the lived experiences of child criminal exploitation through local and county lines drug distribution in the London Borough or Tower Hamlets and paramilitary recruitment in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Framing criminal exploitation as a modern slavery issue, the research employs critical victimology in scrutinising how criminal exploitation is defined in policy and how this does or does not respond to the lived experiences of this victimhood. This research is informed by my previous practice experience in youth intervention in Tower Hamlets, working in a frontline capacity against criminal exploitation and serious youth violence.