Criminal organizations recruit minors across Europe in order to exploit them as low-level and low-risk workers, who nonetheless carry out acts as serious as drug trafficking and murder, according to a Europol intelligence briefing.
Europol’s findings concluded that, in recent years, targeted recruitment of minors has evolved into a deliberate tactic by criminal networks to distance themselves from the orders handed down by their leaders.
Employing such young workers, who know next to nothing of who they truly work for or the big picture behind what they’re ordered to do, creates a buffer of plausible deniability for criminal hierarchies to evade detection, arrest, or prosecution.
The law enforcement intelligence agency believes that minors are now involved in more than 70 percent of existing criminal markets. They can be put to work and exploited across a variety of enterprises including those that utilize acts of violence.
“The practice has expanded across multiple countries and recruitment methods have shifted, with minors increasingly tasked with violent activities including extortion and murder,” Europol said.
Amongst the most prominent criminal endeavors youths are drawn is drug trafficking, primarily in cocaine markets but also to a lesser degree in synthetic drug and heroin networks.
Workers as young as 13-years-old are old enough to have a place in any given drug dealing network, be it as dealers, couriers, or warehouse workers, Europol said.
Violence within the drug dealing industry has also been glamorized to minors, with crime groups offering payment as high as 20,000 euros ($21,200) for killings, Europol said.
In all cases, however, these young workers are never in direct contact with higher echelons of their employers, thereby limiting their awareness of the criminal hierarchy. Further, their lack of existing criminal records makes them low-risk operatives, and they are unable to provide law enforcement with information they do not know, should they be arrested.
To draw minors into their employ, predators use social media and “emotionally charged language that fosters trust, loyalty, and a sense of belonging” to groom them into the criminal lifestyle, Europol said. Recruiters seek out youth who are seeking validation, protection, or a sense of community, and then exploit their emotional needs.
